Most of you know I am a great fan of cruise-ship vacationing, especially for families. With a cruise, everyone in the family wins.

The kids have 18 hours a day of tailor-made activities available, even when the ship is in port. The “Kids Club,” as we call it, allows parents plenty of time to tour various ports of call unencumbered by whining, cranky kids. The kids get to leave the boring itineraries of parents to the parents and get on with doing what kids do best, playing.

If you shop the lines, I find you can get some incredible bargains cruising. It does take a little legwork. One of the best places to shop and compare cruise deals is Cruise.com. However, when Celebrity canceled the first two days of our current cruise, Cruise.com proved to be ineffective in helping me resolve hotel accommodations or rebooking flights. I was left pretty much on my own.

I’ve been told that a local travel agent can match the deals found on Cruise.com. If that proves to be true, in the future I’ll shop the deals online with sites like Cruise.com, Cruisecritic.com, etc., but place the order with my local travel agent.

Currently, we are sailing on the Celebrity Millennium, a relatively new ship put into service in 2000. This is my 11th cruise. Marcia and I have sailed on a variety of cruise lines: Carnival, Royal Caribbean, NCL, Holland America, Cunard, and more recently Celebrity.

It will come as no surprise to clients and longtime readers of my columns that one of the main features I look for in a ship is good food—really good food. I consider the food on Carnival and Royal Caribbean equivalent to the Golden Corral, food for the masses. A step up is the food on Holland America and Cunard’s main dining rooms. But so far, the food on Celebrity has them all beat, especially on the Millennium. The food in the main dining room on the Millennium is superior to that I had in the main dining room on the much ballyhooed Queen Mary II. Surprising, but true.

I stress the “main dining room,” because some ships now offer alternative dining rooms, where for an additional $25 or $30 per person, you can dine in true gourmet fashion. I’ve eaten in the alternative dining room aboard three ships: the Amsterdam, the Queen Mary II, and now the Millennium. Two of these alternative restaurants are outstanding: Queen Mary II’s “Todd English” and the Millennium’s “The Olympic.”

I would rather stay in the least expensive stateroom, typically an inside cabin, and spend my money dining in the alternative restaurant every night. For example, our current 14-day cruise cost $900 per person for our inside cabin, which is unarguably the worst cabin on the ship. I got a great rate by booking the cruise 10 months in advance, as those booking the same cabin three months prior to sailing paid $2,500 per person.

To upgrade to an outside cabin would have cost an additional $300 per person. So I had to weigh looking out of a window in a cabin I would rarely be in, at a seascape that pretty much looks the same from day to day, against dining every night like a king in The Olympic dining room. For me, that was a no-brainer.

For the most part, the Millennium is a great ship. It has plenty of common areas, cafés, indoor and outdoor pools, hot tubs, saunas, and all the common trappings of a newer ship. We’re all enjoying our trip across the Atlantic.