What your travel agent needs to know

I’ve been working as a cruise travel agent for about two years now, and I’ve learned that the process of talking with clients about potential vacations can go a lot more smoothly if they know what kind of information to give me. Based on my experience, here’s what your travel agent wants to know about you so she can help you book your perfect cruise:

When do you want to travel? But more than that, when CAN you travel? If you have kids in school (that you don’t want to take out of school), or if you have a restricted job like an accountant, I need to know that so I don’t waste our time with sailings that won’t work for you.

How flexible are you in your timing? Can you go last minute? It really helps for me to know where you live – for instance, I can tell you that trying to fly from Kansas City to south Florida in March is a fool’s errand – the tickets are outrageously expensive. But if you live in a place like North Carolina, like I do, and you don’t mind driving to the cruise ports in Florida (I don’t mind!), that’s helpful for me to know.

Are there any places you’ve been before or cruise lines that you’ve sailed on before? If so, tell me what you like and (especially) what you don’t like. If you don’t like the Bahamas, or the Southern Caribbean, makes sure you tell me that up front – even if you sort of like something, and you just aren’t sure that you want to do it again.

What’s your budget? Everyone hates this question, but honestly if you only want to spend about $5000 for your trip and I price you something that’s $10,000, it’s a waste of everyone’s time. If you want to (and it helps you feel better about spending lots of money), tell me how much you want to spend per person, per day, etc.

In your mind, what’s the ideal vacation? Is it relaxing or exciting? Do you want to try new foods and drink? Do you want to do daredevil things like rope courses and ziplines, or do you want to sit on a beach? For that matter, do you want a beach/island vacation, or a scenic one (Alaska, Norway), or a history one (Europe)?

Finally, the logistics. We can’t get you a quote unless we know how many cabins you need, how many people will be in each cabin, and what their ages are at the time of the sailing.

I’m going to ask you a lot of questions, inevitably, as we plan your vacation. But providing me with this information ahead of time will really help get the ball rolling on getting you hooked up with your dream vacation!

Saving money on your pre-cruise purchases

If you’re lucky, in the months leading up to your cruise, the cruise line will run a sale on pre-cruise purchases such as beverage packages, specialty dining, and shore excursions. This post will talk specifically about Royal Caribbean, but the same principle applies to all lines: When the price of something you’ve already purchased drops, the only way to get the new price is to cancel the previous purchase and re-purchase at the lower price.

The first step is to find the place on the site where you can see your prior purchases. On Royal Caribbean, this is called your “Order History” and it’s located at the top right of the screen. Once you click here, you’ll see all the purchases you’ve already made and, if you click on “see order details,” you’ll see what you paid for them.

If the price on the current sale is lower, all you have to do is click “Cancel” and cancel your first purchase. Once you’ve gone through that process, you want to immediately go back to the Cruise Planner and make the purchase at the lower price.

That’s how easy it is! Cheers!

Pre-cruise prep: Plan your cruise!

This is the second of a series of posts designed to provide advice for planning and preparing for your cruise vacation. You can read the first post here and the third post here.

My husband likes to joke that planning for a trip is the best part – even better than actually taking the trip! While it’s true that research actually does back him up, sort of, I’m not sure I totally agree. But planning for a cruise is fun – and in many cases, it’s an important part of making sure you have an enjoyable trip, too.

Of course, you could walk on your cruise ship with nothing planned ahead of time, and you might still have a wonderful time. But if planning really is a big part of the fun, why not do some of that too?  Here are a few of my thoughts on things that you should plan before your cruise, especially for those of you who may be new to cruising, or who might be back after taking several years’ break. (If you’re cruising on a newer, bigger ship – such as the Royal Caribbean Oasis or Anthem Class – make sure to read this section #4 below about reservations for entertainment and Broadway-style shows.)

1. Food and drinks. When I started cruising in earnest in the 2000s, we often joked about being afraid of our onboard bill at the end of the week, because we’d racked up such a large tab at the bar. 😉 Today’s cruises offer an alternative to this big-bill-panic: The unlimited beverage package. There are lots of opinions on the web about whether you should buy a beverage package (also here and here), and of course I have my own thoughts too. But one thing is clear: If you are going to buy a beverage package, you should absolutely do so before your cruise, as the prices will be cheaper and the cruise lines will sometimes offer pre-cruise sales.
   
   Another new trend is cruising is what’s called specialty dining. These are meal options that aren’t included in your basic cruise fare; they’re often somewhat more upscale and the service and setting are more intimate than the main dining room. These options vary from cruise line to cruise line; for instance, Royal Caribbean’s specialty restaurants often charge a flat fee, where Norwegian’s tend to charge a la carte. If you want to check these options out, I’d highly suggest that you look online in your cruise planner for special offers, as you can often get a deal by buying your specialty dining ahead of your cruise.
2. Shore excursions. As a frequent cruiser, I’ve become much more DIY about my schedule when a cruise is in port. I often do some research myself and sometimes just wind up walking around the port city, especially if it’s a place I’ve not been to before. But if you’d rather have someone do the work for you, you might want to consider a shore excursion, which is a preplanned tour at your cruise port. You can buy these through the cruise line by visiting the online site before your cruise, or you can do this on board your cruise. Planning and buying ahead, however, guarantees you a space in the excursion of your choice, and sometimes you might even find your excursion slightly discounted by buying ahead.
3. Internet access. As a travel agent and blogger, I pretty much need to have access to the internet at all times. (Also, I might be a little addicted to Twitter, haha.) Maybe you like to take your cruise vacations as an opportunity to disconnect from the world, and you don’t need internet access. That’s great! But if you do want to buy an internet package, you should look to do so before your trip and purchase online. You’ll usually get much lower prices this way than if you buy internet on the ship. Most cruise lines offer a variety of packages at different price points. (My husband and I tend to buy the package for 1 device and share the access – it just means that we can’t both be logged on at the same time, but we can work around that.)
4. Entertainment. Traditionally, you could attend cruise ships’ nightly entertainment shows by simply walking into the theater and taking a seat. But on many of today’s cruise ships, entertainment is a far cry from the shows I saw when I first started cruising with my mom in the 1990s. Royal Caribbean, in particular, has really amped up its entertainment game with shows like Grease (Harmony and Independence of the Seas), Cats (Oasis of the Seas), Hairspray (Symphony of the Seas), and my favorite, Mamma Mia (Allure of the Seas). Due to increased demand – and the ever-increasing number of passengers on these cruise ships – you now have to pre-book your reservations for many shows on these ships. In many cases, you can opt to join a walk-up line on the day of the show, but if you want to ensure that you won’t be left out in the cold, pre-booking your reservations is the way to go.

You can also book spa treatments and other on-board amenities and activities before your cruise – or if you prefer, you can wait until you’re on the cruise and see if the mood strikes you. After all, you’re on vacation!

Click here to go to the next post, Check-in online and go!

Pre-cruise prep: Setting up your online account

This is the first of a series of posts designed to provide advice for planning and preparing for your cruise vacation. You can read the second post here and the third post here.

Much like any kind of travel, your cruise vacation can be managed using an online account. If you’re cruising for the first time, or you’re cruising with a new cruise line, you’ll need to set up your account with that company so you can manage your cruise vacation. (You can and should do this even if you’ve used a travel agent to book your cruise.)

To do this, go to the homepage of the cruise line you’ve booked your trip with and look for the link to log in, then choose to create a new account. Links to popular cruise lines’ login pages can be found in the list below:

• Royal Caribbean
• Celebrity Cruises
• Norwegian Cruise Lines
• Carnival Cruises

You’ll need to give your personal information and choose a user ID and password. You may need your cruise reservation number in order to link your booked cruise to your account.

(If you’re cruising for the first time, or cruising with a new company, you’ll also want to make sure to set up a loyalty account for each person traveling with you on the cruise. Whether it’s Royal Caribbean’s Crown and Anchor, Norwegian’s Latitude Rewards, Celebrity’s Captain’s Club, or one of the many others, these loyalty programs can offer benefits to frequent cruisers. Some of the smaller perks will even start to kick in as soon as your second cruise!)

Each cruise line has its own online pre-cruise planning system, so you’ll want to take some time looking around and getting used to the site. In general, though, the site will allow you to pre-plan (and often pre-pay) elements of your cruise experience such as beverage packages, shore excursions, etc. (More on that in the next blog post.)

Ultimately, you’ll need to use your online account to check in and print out your boarding documents before you take your cruise. But why should you do this earlier? Well, often the cruise lines will offer sales or discounts on pre-cruise purchases, or other deals such as prepaying for dining. So by signing in early, you might save a few bucks!

Make sure you remember the login ID and password you created for this site – you’ll use them to check-in online and get your cruise documents when it’s time for you to go on your cruise!

Click here to go to the next post, Plan Your Cruise.

The dreaded “solo supplement”: myths and truths

I’ve been extremely lucky to put my career as a college professor on hold for a year while I get started as a travel agent and do some (pretty fun) research about all sorts of cruise experiences. One thing I’ve learned is that I’m a pretty big fan of cruising solo.

I’m certainly not the only one who likes cruising alone – you can read plenty of blog posts about how to make the most of your solo cruise, including specific tips for solo cruisers on Royal Caribbean and Norwegian Cruise Lines. (Both of these lines offer solo cabins for cruisers, such as the studio cabin I had on my Norwegian Bliss transatlantic cruise, which you can see in the picture at the top of this post.)

What I wanted to talk about today is the thing we don’t like to talk about, especially if we like to travel a lot: Money.

I think it helps a lot to think about the business of cruising, something I allude to in my post about finding deals on last-minute cruises. The cruise industry has built itself around the premise of double occupancy – that is, that each 2-person cabin will be occupied by two people.

Sometimes, of course, a cabin will be occupied by more than two people: When a family brings kids, for instance, or when more budget-conscious cruisers decide to put three or four people in a room to cut down on costs. Often, though, you’ll find that third and fourth passengers are heavily discounted or even free – this becomes cost-effective for the cruisers, but not really too great for the cruise company’s bottom line.

It’s easy to compare a cruise ship cabin to a hotel room: We don’t pay any differently to have one or two people stay in a hotel. But of course, the costs to the company of a cruise ship passenger extend much farther than the costs of a hotel room occupant (food, staff in the kids clubs, extra use of resources like toilet paper, etc). The cruise line is willing to discount third and fourth passengers because often they’re kids, and frankly, no one is probably going to pay full price to jam four people into a 180-sq-ft cabin no matter how great the cruise is.

But here’s where things get tricky: When a cruise ship cabin is occupied by only one person, instead of two, the problem isn’t that the cruise company uses additional resources. It’s that the company doesn’t recoup its expected costs, which it plans to use to pay staff like waiters and stewards and do all of the other things it needs to do to run the cruise, because it only has one paying customer in the cabin, not two.

Because of this, many cruise lines will charge what’s often known as a “single supplement” or “solo supplement” to account for the expected fare that’s not being paid by a second passenger. In truth, I think this is a bad way to look at it: Really, you’re just paying for a second person, even though that person isn’t actually there. (You do pay the fare, but not the taxes and port fees, which is why cruising single is often roughly double the cost of cruising with someone else.)

As a solo cruiser myself, I’d love it if the cruise lines would change their policies to be more in line with the hotel industry, but I understand why it’s not possible. So in the next post, I’ll look at what you can do to book a solo cruise that’s affordable and realistic.

Interested in booking a solo cruise? See more on my website or click here to contact me for more information.

Transatlantic on the cheap

I’ve just returned from my 12-day inaugural voyage on the Norwegian Bliss, and I have tons of pictures to process and blog posts to write about this fantastic ship. But first, I have a confession to make:

*whispers* I’m going on another transatlantic cruise…and I leave tomorrow.

I know, I know, it sounds crazy. But hear me out: I was able to make this cruise so cheap that I almost couldn’t afford to stay at home! Here’s how I did it.

First of all, timing was everything. I’ve written before about how to find cheap cruise fares, and about how transatlantic voyages — where a cruise line repositions its ships from the Caribbean to Europe for the season and vice versa — are often a great opportunity to play the supply-and-demand pricing game to your advantage. I booked this cruise, on Royal Caribbean’s Jewel of the Seas, at the beginning of February for a May 6 sail date.

Getting this deal did require a bit of vigilance on my part. I had identified the Jewel TA (often used as an abbreviation for transatlantic, which is a bit long) as one that I was interested in because I’ve been on the ship and loved it, and it featured a lot of new-to-me ports. I wound up watching the price pretty closely for two weeks at the end of January into the beginning of February before I caught the price drop and decided to seal the deal.

Transatlantic cruises can be tricky because they involve one-way airfare between Europe and the U.S., usually, and such things can be pricey. (Working with your travel agent or the cruise lines, however, you might be able to get a reasonable deal here.) In our case, we needed two one-way flights: From our home in North Carolina to San Juan, where Jewel has been homeported, and back to the US from Europe after the cruise was over.

I’ve found that one-way tickets are maybe your best use of frequent-flier miles and points, and that’s what we did: I used American Express Membership Rewards points to buy our tickets to San Juan, and Delta SkyMiles to buy our tickets back to the U.S. Using miles especially helps you avoid the penalty that often comes with buying one way travel (although this isn’t nearly so bad as it used to be).

At the risk of being one of “those people,” I’m excited to share that the up-front cost of our 14 night cruise on the Jewel (in a balcony cabin, no less!), including taxes, fees, and airfare, was under $2000 for the hubby and I! We’ll be stopping along the way in the Canary Islands, Gibraltar, and twice in Spain (Alicante and Valencia). I’m looking forward to mornings on the balcony writing lots of blogs to share with everyone about my (nearly a) month on the high seas!

Researching your port stops

There are a lot of reasons I love cruising, but one of the main ones is that I LOVE doing research on what I should do in each of my port stops. After all, I’m a nerd! As I’m planning for my upcoming transatlantic cruise on the new Norwegian Bliss, I thought I’d do a blog post to tell you about how I research and make plans for my days in port.

You always have the option to book shore excursions through the cruise line, and sometimes – when I’m in a new port or a new part of the world – I’ll do this, for a few reasons. It’s easy – I don’t have to do a lot of work; I just log into the web site and pick my trips through the online pre-cruise planner. When you book through the cruise line, you know that the ship will always wait for you if your excursion is delayed returning.

But I’ve had good and bad experiences with shore excursions through the cruise line, and for that reason, I often try to make my own plans.

If I decide to do my own research, I start with a simple Google search. For my Bliss transatlantic, I only have two stops: Ponta Delgada, Azores and Halifax, Nova Scotia. I began my research on Ponta Delgada with a Google search for “Ponta Delgada cruise port.” I find that adding the words “cruise port” to my search helps to refine the results so that I get specific advice for stopping in a location on a cruise ship vs. taking a land-based vacation.

Often I’ll find that one of the top results is a port information page from the website Cruise Critic. Cruise Critic is an excellent resource for planning your port stops and you can also visit their cruise port specific message boards to read about other people’s experiences in those ports.

Occasionally, your Google search will turn up a real gem. In this case, I found this extremely helpful Ponta Delgada guide from a website called Tom’s Port Guides. Now, being an academic/nerd, I know that it’s always important to check out your sources to make sure they’re reliable, so I looked on this site (as I always do) for an About Us page to learn more about the site. Turns out these well-done guides are created by a guy who loves to travel and likes to create travel guides for his favorite cruise ports. Thanks, Tom!

Next, I’ll do a Google search for the name of the port with the word “blog” swapped in for “port.” This will help me find blog posts from people like myself who like to write about their travels. It’s important to check the dates on these posts to make sure that they’re current, and of course with any travel blog, it’s important to remember that the author’s experiences and decisions might be different from your own. I was fortunate to find this fantastic description of Ponta Delgada from TravelShopGirl and now feel like I have a great idea what to expect from my day in Ponta Delgada!

Getting to the port: Parking for cruises out of Fort Lauderdale

I was no stranger to Port Everglades, the giant cruise port just a few miles from Ft. Lauderdale airport (FLL). In fact, I’d cruised out of it many times, and I could tell you in one sentence how to get to that port from the airport: Land, pick up your bags, get in a taxi (or Lyft/Uber), go to the port. But that wouldn’t be much of a blog post, would it?

Because I’m taking some time off work right now, I was lucky enough to go on not one, not two, but three cruises out of Port Everglades in just a couple of months’ time. Rather than make three plane trips, my husband and I decided to take some time as “temporary snowbirds,” and we drove our car down to Florida. Hey, it was February and March – we wanted some warm weather!

We tried three options for parking, and the good news is that I felt like all of them were pretty good options that I would use again.

1. Park N Fly at the Fort Lauderdale airport was a great experience. We prepaid and used a deal on my American Express card to get $15 back on our reservation. Using the lot was simple: We entered and were directed to the side of the lot where cruisers were parked, then a van shuttle picked us up right at the car and delivered us to the cruise terminal. When we came back from the cruise, we called the number we’d been given and a shuttle came to the terminal and picked us up, then dropped us right back at the car.
2. We arrived at the Park N Go at the airport on a particularly busy day – there were 7 ships at Port Everglades, including the Royal Caribbean mega-ship Harmony of the Seas. On that day, they were using a valet-type system where you dropped off your car at a central location, then hopped on a shuttle to the appropriate cruise ship’s terminal. When we returned from our cruise, the shuttle picked us up and dropped us right off at our car, which had been parked in the lot. One quirky thing about this lot is that an area next door is populated by monkeys, which are pretty darn cute! (but don’t feed them – for your own safety!)
3. On one of the cruises, we talked to some folks who sang the praises of the on-site parking at Port Everglades, so for the final of the three cruises, I decided to give it a try. The price is a little bit higher, $15/day versus $10-$13 for the other places, so it made more sense for a shorter, 5-day cruise. My experience here was a mixed bag: Our cruise ship went out of the inconveniently-placed Terminal 29, for which we had to take a shuttle to and from the midport parking garage. However, if we’d been out of one of the closer terminals (18 and 19 are especially close), this garage would have been incredibly convenient. Here you can see the Celebrity Summit docked at terminal 19 in a picture I took from the garage where I parked our car.

If your cruise is leaving out of Port Everglades, you can use the Cruise Terminal app (link will take you to the Apple store) to determine what terminal your cruise will be departing out of.