The people behind the pages
Every page on this site names its writer and its fact-checker, because travel advice is only as good as the experience behind it. Between them, these five have logged more than 480 sailings, paid for by this site rather than by cruise lines.
Writers
Mara Vance
Senior Cruise Editor
Mara Vance has been writing about cruise travel since 2011, first for a regional newspaper travel desk and, since 2019, as the senior editor at BestCruiseDeals.us. She sets the review framework every cruise line page on this site is scored against.
71 sailings · 10 lines
Daniel Okafor
Cruise Pricing Analyst
Daniel Okafor tracks cruise fares for a living. He maintains the price series behind every cost page on this site, sampling lead-in fares across the fifteen lines we cover on a fixed weekly schedule so the numbers we publish are comparable month to month rather than screenshotted once and forgotten.
34 sailings · 8 lines
Lena Hartley
Ports and Destinations Writer
Lena Hartley covers the parts of a cruise that happen off the ship: departure port logistics, shore excursions, weather windows and whether a port call is worth leaving the ship for at all.
48 sailings · 8 lines
Fact-checkers
Reviewers do not write pages; they check them. Every page carries a named reviewer and a review date, and prices are re-verified against cruise line sources at least every 90 days.
Captain Alberto Ruiz
Marine and Operations Reviewer
Captain Alberto Ruiz spent 26 years at sea, the last nine as a staff captain on premium cruise ships, before retiring ashore in 2021. He fact-checks anything on this site that touches ship operations, safety, itinerary feasibility or weather.
Priya Raman
Family and Accessibility Reviewer
Priya Raman reviews every page on this site that makes a claim about travelling with children, travelling with a disability or travelling with older relatives. She is a former special education coordinator and has cruised with a wheelchair user in her party on eleven sailings.
How we work, what we accept and what we never do is documented in our editorial policy and affiliate disclosure.