Booking a Cruise

Booking a Cruise II

If you're more comfortable with a somewhat younger crowd, you might want to consider Carnival Cruise line. They have an average passenger age of around 35-40 with a generous portion of younger people.

Royal Caribbean is a somewhat older crowd. They say their average passenger age hovers somewhere around age 50. But there are other factors.

First there is the time of year. Eastbound transatlantic cruises usually take place before school lets out for the summer – usually the last week of April to the first week of May. The Westbound return cruises leave the last week of October to the first week of November – well after school is back in session. For this reason you’ll find your fellow passengers are seniors with very few younger family people.

Also there is the factor of the cruise length. Simply stated the longer the cruise the older the crowd. When you attend an evening stage show on a two week long transatlantic cruise and look out over the crowd, you’ll see a sea of white heads.

Cruise Tip: The longer the cruise the older the passengers, the shorter – the younger. If you want a young party-oriented cruising experience you might want to book a four or five day long cruise. If you would prefer a much older, quieter relaxing cruise experience – try a cruise over 10 days in duration.

Budget Cruising

If you search around the Internet you’ll find sites that feature cruise reviews. If you read through some of them you’ll learn that there’s one cruise line that garners the most complaints. It’s Norwegian Cruise Line. My travel agent who specializes in cruises won’t even book NCL as they’ve received too many complaints in the past.

Cruise Tip: Though many cruisers enjoy NCL, reviews indicate that Norwegian Cruise Line may not provide as uniform a cruise experience as other lines that charge higher fares.

Airline Reservations

You’ll need to book your air flights well before your departure date to avoid the terribly high fare the airlines charge for last-minute tickets. Now you’re faced with a choice. Should you allow the cruise line to make your air reservations for you – or should you arrange your flights yourself? It’s so handy to just say "let them do it"!

In our experience, if you let the cruise line arrange your flights you’ll end up flying through several different airports making plane changes that are not really necessary. By handling your own reservations you can choose much more direct and much faster travel. Getting up at 4am to rush to the airport to catch a flight at 5 is a real bore when you can easily catch a 9am flight and sleep in.

The negative here has to do with the cruise line’s attitude. If your flight should be delayed and you are unable to arrive at your ship before its departure, the cruise line will make arrangements to get you to the ship at its next port - at their expense. (Or so they say)

But if you make your own arrangements and should miss your ship – good luck - you’re on your own. Our experience with letting the cruise line handle our air travel has been uniformly negative so we arrange our own flights.

The cruise lines routinely booked us on flights that left our home airport at ungodly hours usually around 4 or 5am. Then they jockeyed us around the country making numerous stops here and there. Sometimes they took us well out of our way which seemed particularly offensive. Imagine flying from Cleveland to Miami through Denver!

Cruise Tip: We prefer to board our ships in Miami where the airport is large enough to handle large influxes of air traffic without delays. In Miami for $21 you can catch a taxi that will take you directly to your ship. (The fare is fixed by law) Just be sure to have your cruise ticket booklet with you in your handbag inside the taxi as you’ll need it to get through the security check when you enter the pier.

Ft. Lauderdale is a very popular cruise ship port. Unfortunately in our experience the airport there is much too small and limited to handle the flow of passengers that cruise ships create. We once sat on a bus for an hour waiting to get out of the port. There were scores of busses all jammed together trying to get out through the two lane wide gate. The bus driver came on the public address system and apologized. He said that the port facilities hadn’t been improved for over twenty years. And since the flow of cruisers has more than quadrupled in that time – traffic jams were inevitable. (I counted eight ships that all pulled into the port within a two hour period on a Sunday morning)

When we got to the airport we got more of the same. The place was so jammed with cruise passengers; the staff propped open the doors because the airport air conditioning system couldn’t keep up. The place was hot, humid and smelled like a giant wrestling room. The line to get through the metal detectors was over an hour long! For these reasons we prefer Miami as the airport is so much larger and more comprehensive. (We’ve also used Baltimore for our Canada cruise and found it very satisfactory.)

Cruise Tip: The Miami airport and port are larger and better equipped to handle large volumes of passengers. Ft. Lauderdale is a smaller port and airport so you can expect delays when you pass through their facilities.

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