Last updated: June 14, 2026
Travel Life Vibes is two friends, Wayne and Ryan, and a habit we picked up in 2025 that got a little out of hand: cruising.
We built this site to be the resource we couldn’t find when we were planning our first sailing. Most cruise advice online reads like a brochure or a guess. We wanted something in between — real opinions from people who’ve actually stepped onto a ship.
This page explains how we work, where our experience comes from, and what you can count on when you read something here.
What We’ve Sailed, and What We Haven’t
We’ll start with the part most cruise sites won’t tell you.
We’ve sailed Royal Caribbean. Our first cruise was a 5-night Baltimore-to-Bermuda run on Vision of the Seas in June 2025, and that trip shapes a lot of what we cover.
We have not yet sailed Carnival, Norwegian, Celebrity, Princess, or most of the other ships and ports that come up on the site.
So when a guide covers something we haven’t done ourselves, we say so, and we back it up with real sources:
- Cruise line websites and official press materials
- Established, well-regarded cruise blogs
- What experienced cruisers report in the wider community
You will never catch us writing as if we’ve sailed something we haven’t. When the knowledge is ours, we’ll tell you. When it’s borrowed, we’ll tell you that too. That honesty is the whole point of the site.
The Kind of Article We Try to Write
Every piece here is built to answer the actual question you showed up with.
Should you book the drink package? Is a balcony worth it on a port-heavy week? What’s embarkation day really like? We’d rather give you a clear answer you can act on than a thousand hedged words that leave you exactly where you started.
If a topic isn’t useful to someone planning a cruise, we don’t write about it just to fill a calendar.
Everything here is original. We don’t copy, scrape, or reword other people’s articles and call them ours.
Keeping Things Accurate
Cruise pricing and rules move around constantly. Drink packages get more expensive, gratuities tick up, dress codes get renamed, and ships swap homeports from one season to the next.
That’s why we go back and revisit older articles to:
- Fix anything that’s drifted out of date
- Re-check prices and policies against current cruise line information
- Add new details as we learn them or sail them ourselves
When a number is the kind that changes often, we’ll tell you roughly when it was accurate so you know to confirm it for your own sailing. We’d rather be right than be fast.
Where AI Fits In
We use AI tools, and we’d rather be honest about it than pretend otherwise. They help us with the supporting work:
- Researching and sorting through information
- Pulling notes and outlines into shape
- Tidying up rough early drafts
What they don’t do is run this site:
- Every article is read, edited, and signed off by one of us before it goes live
- Every fact is checked by us, not left to a tool to get right
- Every opinion and recommendation is ours, drawn from what we’ve actually experienced and researched
An AI has never been on one of our cruises. It doesn’t get to speak for us, and no article reaches you until it’s met the same standard as anything we’d write by hand.
Our Opinions Are Our Own
We think an honest take is worth more than a flattering one.
If something’s overpriced, overhyped, or only worth it for a certain kind of cruiser, we’ll say it. If something’s genuinely good, we’ll recommend it without tiptoeing.
What we won’t do is let an advertiser, sponsor, or affiliate partner tell us what to think. If we point you toward something, it’s because we’d point a friend toward it.
Ads, Affiliates, and Being Upfront
Travel Life Vibes may earn money through advertising, affiliate links, or the occasional sponsored piece. None of that changes what we tell you:
- Affiliate links are disclosed
- Sponsored content is clearly labeled as sponsored
- Our opinions stay independent either way
We only team up with partners that actually fit what our readers need, and we pass on the ones that don’t.
Tell Us When We’re Wrong
We’d genuinely rather hear it from you than leave a mistake sitting there.
Spotted an error? Think we called something wrong? Have a tip that’d make a guide better? Reach out through our contact page. We read it, and we fix what needs fixing.
— Wayne & Ryan, Travel Life Vibes