I'm going sailing (Part I - the cruise planning portion or "how to plan a cruise so I don't waste time and money like a moron")

Sunday - April 28, 2013

Ahh...it's finally here.  The cruise we've (I've) planned that I've been working on for almost a year.  Yay! 

But before we get there, I'm going to talk about how we came about picking this itinerary and what we did to book the cruise itself.  (in case you're confused, this is the bedtime - put you to sleep bedtime, not sexy time - reading portion)

So...how did this entire vacation come about?  It's because of this cruise really.  Well, if you want to get specific it was really because of a family cruise to Mexico that we took in 2003.  That's the first time my parents have ever cruised - and they got bitten by the bug.  Seriously, now we want to cruise everywhere.  I swear, if we could cruise to Yellowstone (which my dad has at times wondered if we could) we totally would.  It literally is the most efficient, best bang for your buck vacation there is.  You have your travel, room, food and entertainment all wrapped up in one tidy package.  I love waking up and stepping out onto the balcony each morning to see where we are - there's something fun and liberating about being a new place each day and seeing something different when you wake up each morning.  Also, the unlimited food and drinks (non-alcoholic of course - they gotta make money somehow), having someone to make your bed, pick up your towels, hang up your clothes, scrub the toilet, make towel animals, and cater to your every whim is freakin' awesome!  I wish I usually had that.  I bet my mama wishes she usually has that too.  

Anyhoo, whenever we decide to go somewhere the first thing we do is check to see if we can cruise to or from there.  Our first European vacation in 2011 was a 12 day Western Mediterranean cruise - in fact, it was the same cruise Samantha Brown took - even the same ship.  Let's just say I was inspired when I saw that episode on the Travel Channel.  We had such a good time, when we decided to do Europe again this year, the first thing we did was look into cruises (of course).  Which randomly came about after dinner last...May?  Maybe early June?  My mama turns to me and suddenly says "I want to go to Europe again.  Let's go next September."  Well, I certainly wasn't going to argue with her.  Who is retarded enough to argue about going to Europe?  So never a slacker when it comes to planning a vacation (though a procrastinator otherwise) I immediately hop onto the trusty internets and start looking for cruises.  I voted (or insisted, depending on your perspective) on leaving from Civitavecchia so I could see Rome again.  That narrowed down the options - and we soon found the itinerary we (I) wanted.

The cruise we picked was a 7 night Eastern Mediterranean cruise (our last cruise was 12 days, which my parents found a tad too long to be eating white people food so this time we decided to go with a 7 day cruise instead) that was a round trip from Civitavecchia.  The ports of call were Messina (Sicily), Piraeus (Athens), Kusadasi (Ephesus), and Souda (Chania, Crete).  I'd never been to any of these places but I was particularly intrigued by Athens and Ephesus and thought that Sicily and Crete would be the chill ports of call where we could just wander around and do some shopping without tiring ourselves out too much.  I knew two things (and only two things) about Sicily.  I knew that the Corleone family from The Godfather movies were from Sicily and two - Vizzini from The Princess Bride said "Never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line!"  Okay, so I really don't know ANYTHING about Sicily.  But whatever, I figured it'd be an interesting day.  I'd long heard that Crete is one of the most beautiful places on earth, so who doesn't want to see one of the most beautiful places on earth?  This cruise also had two built in sea days...I lurve sea days.  They're forced vacation days where you have nothing more urgent or strenuous to do than to eat all day and loll out by the pool.  (sigh)

Since I kept making noises about Rome, we decided to tack on a 7 day land vacation as well.  We played with the dates and I found that cruising in spring instead of fall would save us about $500 or so.  Based on that (you can eat a whole lotta gelato for that amount of money) we opted to vacation in April instead of September.  Once I found the specific cruise I wanted and decided on approximately when were going, I just needed to settle on a firm date.  We had enough mileage in the bank to book 3 business class tickets on United (yay!) and then I set about hammering down the itinerary for our vacation.  Royal Caribbean's May departures were more expensive than April departures, so we opted for the last cruise in April and a land vacation the week before.  I wanted to spend the entire week before the cruise in Rome but my dad, in his infinite wisdom, said that our free tickets came with one stop and it would be a shame to waste it.  Once we "discussed" (meaning my mama told us what we were going to do) our options, we settled on Paris.  Now we just had to make sure there were plane tickets available for the dates we were looking at (which is the hardest part of any vacation).  It worked out that if we took the April 28th cruise, there were tickets available for an April 20th flight to Paris and tickets for a flight back from Rome on May 6th.  We disembark on the 5th, and though I would've preferred to build in a buffer day before I had to drag my jet lagged and depressed self off to work, it didn't matter - I'd deal.  Now I had to book the cruise before I could tackle  the housing issue for the first week.  

I used to be one of those drones who would go online, book through the cruise line's website, and then leave it alone until it was time to leave.  No more!  I've been schooled in the ways of master vacation planners by Cruise Critic and will never do that again.  I cringe thinking of the money I could've saved on my previous trips, but hey, no sense crying over spilled milk (wine?  who cries over spilled milk?).  So once I decided we were taking the 4/28 cruise, I needed to shop around for the price.  As it was only going to be the three of us on this cruise, we opted for a superior balcony room instead of the suites or penthouses we'd usually get.  It's not like a whole lot of time is spent in the cabin, so instead of spending the extra grand on a larger room, we decided to save the money for our excursions. I was right - the balcony room (category D1, as opposed to D2 and D3's which are the smaller balcony rooms) was more than sufficient for the 3 of us.  But before I booked it, I wanted to see if I was booking early enough (in June) to get one of the prized bonus rooms.  Bonus room you say?  What the hell is a bonus room??!!  Excellent question grasshopper.  Each ship has a few magic bonus rooms that are not advertised to the public.  Only those who are willing to put in time and effort (or are just plain crazy like me) in researching the crap out of their ship usually find it.  So...what are bonus rooms?

A bonus room is a room that for some reason or another is much bigger and better than what it's categorized as.  A lot of people with balcony rooms make a run for the "hump" rooms on big ships (where the sides of the ship bump out like a hump) because hump rooms end up having much deeper balconies than others in their category.  Do you need a visual?  Let's give you a couple (pictures stolen from Cruise Critic boards btw)

see the part that bumps out?  that's the hump

the hump on Radiance of the Seas - not hard to see

this is a standard balcony.  This is how deep balconies generally are, even on a lot of suites

this is a hump balcony.  See the difference?

Not every ship has hump balconies although some ships have very deep aft balconies (which I've grown to love).  On our particular ship, I found that for our specific category (D1) there are two cabins on the ship that are both extra large and have humongous balconies.  D1 balcony cabins tend to be long and skinny - when you walk in you'll generally have the bathroom on one side and the closet on the other.  Then a sofa bed that folds out into a queen which faces the vanity and then the bed, the end of which is about 2-3 feet from the wall before you reach the balcony.  Long and skinny - like this:

traditional D1 on Voyager Class ships

I didn't want long and skinny because there's not a lot of room to maneuver around - especially with 3 people.  BUT - I lucked out in that cabins 1688 and 1388, both on the 10th deck, were still available 10 months before the sailing.  These balcony cabins are shaped like squares instead of a long rectangle because of their locations in the aft corner of the ship and have exceptionally large balconies.  So instead of the above, our cabin looked like this:

yes, there's a big ass stripper pole in the middle of the room, but it's positioned in such a way that it didn't affect us at all

hi dad in PJ's

So in contrast to the standard D1 room - not only is it larger, the room is laid out much better in terms of usable space.  We also got an extra club chair which my dad immediately laid claim to.  He scooted it up all the way close to the miniscule TV (I know, we didn't go on a cruise to watch TV dad) and watched a lot of ESPN.  And soccer.  And CNN.  After poking my head into a few rooms (doors were open when the staff was cleaning), our room was approximately the size of the mini-suites, but we had a bigger balcony.  

Was this close quarters?  Yes.  You don't want to stay in a room this size unless you get along real well with your family.  But since we were either out touring or elsewhere on the ship, it worked fine for us.  Besides, we had a huge outdoor living space:

We've never had a balcony this big before.  Evah!  Not only was it HUGE - 2 loungers, 2 chairs, a little table and room for more - but I loved that there were shaded areas (for mama) and sunny areas (for me).  This really sold me on the room since it gave us so much more room to move about.  

Let's take a tour of the tiny balconies we've had in the last few years to demonstrate why I was in love with this balcony.

This was our balcony on our Alaskan cruise:

bad pic of mama (sorry  mom!), but the only photo I've got that shows that end of the balcony

The vertical slats of wood on the bottom right show where the balcony ends

This was the balcony of one of Norwegian's penthouses located at the front of the ship.  

This was our balcony in Hawaii - which was a 2 bedroom penthouse.  The room itself was awesome.  The balcony - not so much (sob)

a really crappy photo - but you can clearly see the depth of the balcony in this photo

This was it - literally.  Two loungers and a little side table/stool.  It was about...15?  Maybe 20 feet wide?  Kind of crappy for the $10k I paid for the week, huh?

And this is the balcony we had on Brilliance of the Seas in 2011:

Anyway, when I realize that both 1688 and 1388 were available, I was very excited.  I priced the cruise on Royal Caribbean's website and it was $2605 for the 3 of us.  Through Cruise Critic I found Cruise Compete - the best site ever for pricing cruises.  You just input the specific itinerary, date, number of people, and room categories you want and various travel agencies submit bids for your business.  Sometimes they'll be cheaper than a cruise line - sometimes not.  But where do you win?  On board credit my friend.  Travel agents will eat into their own commissions to provide you with incentives to book with them - and the best bid I received was from Crown Cruises Vacations (overall, eh - but they got me what I wanted though they weren't the most responsive agents I've ever worked with).  Their bid was for the same price as RCL, but they offered me $250 in on board credit (can be used for purchases, drinks, gratuity, etc) for booking with them.  The bids come with an agent's name and an offer code, so I just called the agent on the phone and booked with her, letting her know that I specifically wanted either 1388 or 1688.  Everything was confirmed via email - and the price actually lowered to $2505 since I got a $100 discount for being a Crown and Anchor platinum member (RCL's loyalty program).  [a week later I realized that the travel agent screwed up and booked us into 1668, not 1688 and I blew a gasket.  I blew up her voice mail and email and called and complained.  She apologized up the wazoo for her inattentiveness (I went crazy bitch on her ass) and offered me an additional $50 OBC for my trouble since both 1388 and 1688 showed up on the website as being no longer available.  Then she offered to monitor the room in case it was just a hold placed on it and moved me to the aft balcony room next to 1688 (1690 - deep balcony - but not as wide and the room is the standard D1 room).  A week later, I got an email from her letting me know that 1688 opened up again and she immediately moved us there.  Hehe]

What's the next best website for cheap bitches like me?  Cruise Fish.  For a fee - I think it's like, $5 for the ability to monitor 10 cruises or something - they will send you email alerts any time the price either goes up or down.  You can set it however you want - only be alerted when the price goes down or when it goes up or both.  You can set it to a specific or however many categories you want per cruise.  I had signed up for it for our 2011 cruise and ended up upgrading us when the price for the suite came down so it was only $1,000 more than we booked for (and come on, $1,000 over the course of 12 nights - it's not bad at all) so I also monitored our newest booking.  Prices for cruises go up and down over the course of weeks, sometimes days.  If you find that the price has decreased - jump on it immediately and get a price adjustment (as long as you haven't made final payment - usually 90 days before embarkation) since it's not going to last.  I got an alert in January, 2 weeks before my final payment was due that the price for our category went down a couple hundred bucks - I emailed our travel agent and requested a price adjustment.  At the end of the day, we paid $2255 for our 7 day cruise in the Western Mediterranean.  

Anyway, that was a long ass boring ass primer on how to book a cruise and how not to let them rape you up the butt after you've booked.  We'll go back to me droning on and on about my trip next :)