Table Of Content
- Costco Travel
- What is the best website for booking cruises?
- $1,214 pp — 7-Nt. Alaska Balcony w/ Exclusive $25-$1,500 bonus, 75% off 2nd guests, free drinks & wi-fi
- $399 pp — 7-Nt. Alaska w/Exclusive $25 bonus, free gratuities included, free shore excursions & more
- Departure Months
- Search and you shall (hopefully) find!
It can offer some impressive deals, but once you read the fine print, well, you realize there’s a lot of fine print. CruisesOnly’s best price guarantee is similar to other sites — a refund of 110% of the price difference if you find a lower price on an identical cruise within 48 hours of booking. The V.I.P. Customer Loyalty Club is free, and you’re signed up automatically if you have booked with CruisesOnly at least once before. Benefits include things like shore excursion credits and onboard spending credits. When you’re searching for a cruise, just click on the drop-down arrow that tells you how many deals there are — then you’ll be able to see that cruise’s price on many sites. Priceline gained fame from its “Name Your Own Price” feature but has since transformed into a more traditional OTA.
Costco Travel
Avoid cabins below frequently used passageways on the top decks where footsteps and the sound of deck chairs moving frequently can be annoying. Even higher category cabins can be one deck below the main deck so it is wise to ask about this when reserving. River cruising is another smart first-time choice, adds Spencer Brown. “You can literally walk off the ship into town, go to a park or ride a bike, or just sit on the top deck breathing the air—it’s marvelous,” she says. These can add another $100-$200 per person, depending on your specific trip.
What is the best website for booking cruises?
Solo travelers should look out for sales that waive the solo supplement, which can save you up to 50% of the normal single cabin price. Families should watch out for kids sail free sales or other discounted third and fourth guest offers. While waiting until the last minute to book a cruise won't always pay off for your wallet, that's not always the case.
$1,214 pp — 7-Nt. Alaska Balcony w/ Exclusive $25-$1,500 bonus, 75% off 2nd guests, free drinks & wi-fi
Travel expert reveals 'secret' trick to get cheap cruise holidays that 'companies want to keep quiet' - LADbible
Travel expert reveals 'secret' trick to get cheap cruise holidays that 'companies want to keep quiet'.
Posted: Wed, 20 Mar 2024 07:00:00 GMT [source]
Cruise.com is just about as specific and simple as you can get. It’s a website, named after exactly what you want to book — a cruise! Unfortunately, while the name is simple, the website isn’t always as simple as it could be.
Instead, they may offer you onboard credit, complimentary excursions or credit toward another cruise booking. Its message boards offer ways for website visitors to ask questions and share feedback with others based on their personal experiences and opinions. The site also acts as a metasearch for cruise deals, pulling in prices from multiple cruise websites. One of my proudest cruise deals was a 16-day full-transit Panama Canal cruise for $76 per person per day (that doesn’t include port charges, fees, taxes, or gratuities).
The cheapest ways for travel agents to get cruise deals in front of the biggest audiences possible are email marketing, SMS (text messages) and social media. And this is exactly where they head when they have cheap cruise deals to push. There are “off-seasons” or “shoulder seasons” for most cruise regions. Typically, these times of year have fewer guests and cheaper cruises. We tend to purchase such trips a year in advance with a travel agent, and that is how we have sailed on some of the world’s newest and largest ships for deep discounts. If you have flexible travel dates, often times you can also get a considerably discounted cruise cabin with last minute cruise deals.
Check out this guide to finding a cheap flight to lower that cost. Consider using less expensive forms of transportation to explore a city during your port stop. Local buses and subways can be more affordable ways to get around, plus offer a glimpse into local life. Cruise ships will discount paid attractions on the fly if they need to drum up more revenue in a certain area or if restaurants are not full.
Departure Months
Okay, so Vacations To Go sounds like it would give you the option to book everything you might need for an entire vacation. But, one quick look at the website’s homepage shows that it bills itself as an online cruise agency. It boasts that it’s the largest cruise agency in the world. It also says it can save you over 80% on cruise fares, but that’s not proven. No matter where you book your cruise, you’ll be paying the same base price 9 times out of 10.
Search and you shall (hopefully) find!
This site does not include all credit card companies or all available credit card offers that are on the market. See our advertising policy here where we list advertisers that we work with, and how we make money. The most expensive time to cruise is always Christmas and New Year when prices will skyrocket to double or triple the normal price. The UK school summer holidays can be pretty expensive too. I wouldn’t expect so – MSC and Costa are well known as being good cruise lines for cheap sailings, and P&O offers great value too. When booking any kind of holiday, it’s important not to think about the ticket price, but to think about the total price, after you’ve paid for absolutely everything.
You'll also have to be flexible to take advantage of these deals. If you have a specific cabin type on a specific sailing on a specific ship that you're eyeing for a vacation, you can't count on it being available — especially not at a rock-bottom rate. As noted above, cruise lines typically offer their lowest fare for any given sailing just after it opens for booking — often two or even three years before it's scheduled to begin. Traditionally, the summer months of June, July and August have been high season in many cruise destinations like the Caribbean, Europe and Alaska.
I'm happy to share the wealth, so to speak, so you can avoid money mistakes and stretch your travel budget as far as it can possibly go. Transportation to and from the port will be costly, especially if you’re traveling abroad. While it may be more boring than a cruise along the French riviera, it’s cheaper to choose an itinerary that begins and ends close to where you live.
However, these are usually only on cold-weather cruises where you wouldn’t want to spend a lot of time on your balcony anyway. While we love to cruise, everyone hates overpaying for their trips. Over the years, we have learned a few secrets to get cheap cruises. If you are shopping around for your next cruise vacation, here are a few hints to help you score an amazing cruise deal. If you want a cheap cruise, however, avoid sailing in the summer.
You'll never find a cheap luxury cruise, but you can find sailings that are less expensive than others (either when sorting by the total cost or the per-night rate). You might have to compromise on sail dates or take a risk with the weather, but you can get great value by choosing the cruise less traveled. Most cruise lines will allow you to book a cruise as much as a year and a half in advance.
