"It's no secret – many seniors love cruise vacations. The convenience, onboard activities, shore excursions and personalized service make cruises particularly popular with mature travelers. Single seniors enjoy cruising, too."

In our continuing effort to create the world's most transparent travel company, we wanted to share with you the progress we've made since our last post on the subject, Bugs & features roadmap (which, in retrospect, sounds like a college course in entomology).

The next big feature set involves building out additional community elements, including integration of photos and videos from travelers, using the Rivet platform. (Rivet's a cool startup in Austin, Texas — check out their site!: rivet.works. Their tagline, "Inspire experiences between people and your brand," dovetails nicely with our mission.)

At Cruiseable,  we have agreements in place with 31 cruise lines, have reviews or previews of 360-plus ships, offer a database of more than 10,000 photos and have tools to help you select from more than 10,000 cruises out there. So you know there will be a bug or two with a startup that just launched in March and is whipping around the next bend.

For our second Cruiser of the Week, we have a new contribution by Andrew Kamphey of Los Angeles about 4 roadside attractions you shouldn't miss on Grand Cayman island.

It comes with some very cool photos of green sea turtles, a classic sports car, li'l lizard and more.

We've also just created a new sanding page for Cruiser of the Week. Let us know if you have a short writeup, review, story or series of photos that you can stitch together into a Visual List. 

Ijust came across the news that Salesforce has chartered an entire cruise ship to serve as a meeting venue and floating hotel for its sprawling Dreamforce tech conference in San Francisco, which will swell San Francisco (population 837,000) by more than 130,000 visitors for four days in September. They've even rechristened Celebrity Infinity as the "Dream Boat" for the week (hey, cruise ship nicknames have a long tradition, right, Princess?). 

So I reached out to Ron Gulaskey, Global Director of Corporate, Incentives and Charter Sales for Celebrity Cruises, to get some specific examples of how cruise incentive trips and corporate charters work.

Here's our 20-minute interview (and here's the full transcript if you prefer to read it): 

Anyone who's spent any time in the travel industry knows that the sector is riddled with silos. Folks in the cruise, hotel or airline industries rarely collaborate or exchange information with people in other sectors. 

But then Travel Massive entered the scene and began busting some silos.

The global organization was founded in 2009 in Australia by Ian Cumming  and Alicia Smith, who's now a marketing manager with World Nomads. It started out as a way to connect travel professionals — travel bloggers, travel and tourism companies, startups and travel journalists — with the goal of creating a series of meetups where people could connect, socialize and exchange knowledge. 

How do we communicate with family, friends and our social networks during a cruise? A study just released by MTN Communications shows a dramatic shift in our device usage in just four years' time.

We were impressed enough by the findings that Christine Davila of our team whipped up the infographic above — please share on your own social networks or blog!

Last year two of our team members attended Cruise Shipping Miami for the industry's annual trade show. I'll be attending again as media on March 17-19, along with our senior marketing manager.

This year's event is especially noteworthy for three reasons:

• We're officially launching the Cruiseable website on Wednesday, March 18. (If you're reading this blog post, you're already here!)
• We're releasing the Cruiseable mobile app for the iPad on Wednesday, March 18. Download it here.
• We're hoping to add additional team members. 

I'll bring my fancy-schmancy Canon 5D and 70-200mm lens again this year — I get one heck of a workout lugging it around!

Here's my Flickr set from last year's event, and one of my favorite shots at top with three representatives of the Peru pavilion.

In the spirit of transparency that we're trying to bring to the cruise and travel space, we're sharing with you many of the programming bugs that our startup is working quickly to vanquish.

And we'll also share some of what's ahead for Cruiseable. Have other ideas of what you'd like to see in a cruise discovery & booking engine and mobile app? Please share in the comments! We'll update this list every week.

You can get a good workout during your cruise at the best fitness areas on Norwegian Cruise Line ships. The ships, like Norwegian Breakaway and Norwegian Getaway, have a wide variety of activities to challenge you.

Freestyle cruising means you can enjoy your vacation the way you want. On your own schedule. If you're like me, that schedule is going to include a daily workout or at least some physical activity to let you know you properly enjoyed a complete day. Norwegian Cruise Line offers freestyle "Cruise like a Norwegian" sailings that its legions of fanatics enjoy so much. And Norwegian Cruise Line includes a range of cool fitness options onboard its ships -- especially its newest vessels. 

It’s time to plan your next cruise with our annual list of some of the best ships to set sail this year. We’ve pulled together a panel of experts — including Bill Panoff, publisher and editor-in-chief of Porthole Cruise Magazine; Jason Leppert, editor of PopularCruising.com; and Anne Campbell, editor of CruisingFromNewYork.com and ShipCriticBlog.com — to help choose our coveted Travel’s Best Cruises 2015. See what cruise lines were picked for specific categories such as Best Caribbean Cruise, Best Luxury Cruise, Best Mediterranean Cruise and Best Theme Cruise. And find out which cruise ship made our list for the second year in a row.

Cruise veterans are going to think I am crazy; I am pretty much resigned to that fact. Our family however has NEVER been on a cruise before, not just a Disney Cruise Line cruise, but any cruise. So when my husband and I decided we would like to try one for our next “Disney trip” I hit the internet like a madwoman soaking in as much Disney Cruise Line knowledge as I possibly could.

There were a lot of things I knew just from being in the Disney trip planning community (yes there is a community and it’s awesome! ha ha) but there were so many things that, as a Disney Cruise Line rookie, I had no idea about.