My Cruise Adventures

Choosing a cruise

This one can be answered any number of ways. For first-time cruisers, it may be best to choose your cruise based on what you can afford. Or, you may want to choose based on which ports the ship will visit. Or, you may want to sail on a specific ship or cruise line, or a specific time. You may want to sail from a specific home port, or visit a specific port. And, there is a wide selection between budget and luxury travel.

Fortunately, there is an excellent search tool at your disposal at VacationsToGo. This search engine requires you to register, but they only send you a newsletter every week or two, so it's not too intrusive. It allows you to search by ship, cruise line, region, dates, or ports visited. Their cruise prices are reasonable and certainly competitive enough to use as a bargaining chip with your travel agent.

By using this search engine, it's easily possible to tell which cruise lines charge more than others for the same itinerary and dates. It's easy to see, for instance, that the cheapest fares for Caribbean cruises are in September and October, after school starts but while there is a larger chance of hurricanes. It's easy to see that Christmas and spring break cruises are more expensive than other weeks.

I have one serious word of advice here - buy a book about cruising. My favorite is Cruising & Cruise Ships 2010 by Douglas Ward, ISBN 978-981-268-665-7, available from Berlitz Publishing. Other books may also be worthwhile, but take a few minutes in the bookstore and look through them first. The nice thing about the Berlitz book is that it has details on every cruise ship sailing today, as well as ships due to come online in 2010.

Inside cabins are the cheapest, followed by outside cabins, then balcony cabins and suites. While a balcony cabin is incredibly nice, it may not be worth the price. We find that we are seldom in our cabin, usually only for sleeping or changing clothes, so booking an inside cabin means more money available for shore excursions or other uses.

To compare cabin sizes, take a look at CruiseStateroom , where you can compare actual cabin sizes between any two ships. You'll find that Norwegian Cruise Lines has the smallest cabins, while Carnival's are much larger.

When booking, have a copy of the ship's deck plans handy. You can either book an assigned cabin (they tell you exactly which cabin, or you tell them which you want) or a guaranteed cabin. The guaranteed cabins should be cheaper, but you won't find out where the cabin is until a week or two before sailing. The drawback is you could get the worst cabin, the benefit is you could get upgraded to a higher class of cabin.

One resource to not overlook is Cruise Critic - in addition to hundreds of articles on every aspect of cruising, they have extensive discussion forums where you can get answers to any question.