We’ve mastered most forms of frugal traveling: free flights through airline credit cards, discounted or free lodging via friend networks, the AFV club, and Airbnb. But when it came to sea travel, I was at a loss.
So what’s the secret? A cruise line credit card? No, actually the secret is a simple website…
CruiseSheet
www.cruisesheet.com is a very simple website that aggregates all the discounted cruises in one site. What makes it great is that you can set up a local port (for us the NYC port is only 30 minutes away), and then have the site email you weekly deal alerts that are from/to that port.
Retail cruises generally costs around $100-$150/day per person. I was targeting a cruise that was closer to $50/day and not for too long (7 days or fewer) because we had never been on a cruise and didn’t want to shell out a bunch of money for a 2-week trip, only to realize we hated it.
After six months of receiving these emails, one deal popped up that really got my attention: a 5-day cruise from Royal Caribbean that was less than $250 per person.
Why are these cruises discounted? Well, some are just off season, some low occupancy, and some are cheap, weird one-way trips.
Our cruise was a rerouting trip, where they were discontinuing a ship’s home location from Puerto Rico and making its new home NYC. These reroute cruises are usually the cheapest way to cruise, but they often require you to fly one-way to the destination or departure location.
In our case, we had to get ourselves to Puerto Rico and have the ship sail us home. We decided to make a trip of it and flew to Puerto Rico a week early to vacation there.
We did travel-hack our tickets to get there, and we used Airbnb to stay in three different places across the island.
Puerto Rico is awesome!
After a week in Puerto Rico, we boarded the cruise ship to embark on the 5-day voyage home.
Perks of Cruises
Cruising is nice because it is all-inclusive of all your typical travel costs: vehicle, lodging, recreation, and food are all included. We had an awesome time, so to get all this for under $50/day is a pretty sweet way to travel and we will definitely be doing it again!
Yokohama Cruise: Large-Family Tips & Tricks for Cruises!
During our year abroad in Japan, we took a wonderful 5-night cruise out of Yokohama Japan on the Princess Diamond. We were traveling with our 4 kids, my Parents, and my Brother.
Originally we were only going to book 2 rooms (Cruise Ship Rooms usually have a 4-person max, suites can hold more but are many times more expensive) with my parents, but then my brother decided he wanted to come too, so we became an uneven party of 9, ended up booking 3 rooms. Price did not change much per person, going from 8 in 2 rooms ($369/per person) to 9 in 3 rooms ($387/per person).
For those that have never been on a cruise, usually cruises are round trip and start and end at the same port. Usually breakfast, lunch and dinner is buffet style, although dinner has the option of a more formal sit-down dinner where staff wait on you. All of this is included, but if you get alcohol or drinks other than water you will have to pay out of pocket. There are also premium restaurants you can choose to dine aboard that are not included (I’ve never gone to one…).
Cell-phone connectivity usually does not work while out to sea, and if you want to stay connected you have to pay something like $15/day per device to stay connected, I always take the opportunity to take an internet-free vacation.
Honestly for our family, we just love the experience of being on a cruise ship, more-so than the destinations or ports it goes too… so we always pick the nearest port to us to keep our travel costs low and look for a shorter, cheap 5-day cruise… we did a 7-day once, but it seemed just a tad too long, we started getting restless and bored of the endless food.
There are several things you can do to make cruising with a large group/family much more affordable and enjoyable:
- Schedule Dinner Reservations as soon as possible, large 8+ Dining reservations go quick.
- Speak to Guest Services, about giving each family member access to each of the groups rooms.
- Bring Stickers or Magnets to decorate your doors and make them easily identifiable.
- Bring Matching Shirts so it is easy to identify your group
- Bring Walkie-Talkies, if the rooms are close together you will be able to communicate in your rooms with them.
- Bring a Baby Monitor, so you can escape during nap time or bedtime, while one of your adjoining family members watches the feed.
- Bring a White Noise Machine and Nightlight to make bedtime smoother.
- Bring a water bottle or camelback, and fill-up at the buffet.
- You can Adjust or take off the automatic gratuity at Customer Service on board the ship: its usually $12-$16 a day per person, please keep in mind that this gratuity is split among all the staff and many workers count on it.
