CRUISES: Cruising for Beginners

Story and photography by
Nancy & Eric Anderson 

 

A cruise can open a traveler’s eyes to previously unknown wonders. It can also represent the bargain vacation but you have to do your homework. You can do it from brochures or websites but part of the fun is finding your options. And there are plenty.

The cruise vacation is unlike any other travel experience. Each cruise line delivers a different package. Windstar , with Wind Surf here off shore at St Tropez, exemplifies the Mediterranean yacht cruise, and Uniworld Boutique River Boat Collection here tied down at Belgrade on the Danube, surely justifies its fancy name: it is small but it dominates European river cruising. Holland America, in its turn, has pioneered the Alaskan voyage.

First understand the market. Short cruises, understandably, cost less. They’re usually favored by young, informal, noisy vacationers but present a great way to sample the cruise experience. Longer cruises tend to be preferred by older travelers and families -- and really long or special destinations cruises are often chosen by retired persons who have both the time and the money. It would probably be a mistake to take a long cruise if you haven’t tried a short one first because cruising is not for everyone.

Cruises can take you to places hard to reach as individuals. The Alaskan glaciers with Holland America, the rice fields of Vietnam with Royal Caribbean, the Marquesas Islands with the freighter Aranui 3. 

Second, consider what your cruise objective is. Do you want a specific departure port perhaps Fort Lauderdale, or a destination in mind, say, Vietnam or an activity like a zip-line canopy adventure, for example, on the Mexican Riviera? Or do you see a cruise as a perfect family experience especially if it offers fabulous children’s programs that would let the parents have some long-awaited private time to themselves? Those are all valid reasons for choosing a cruise and for some perhaps the first consideration.

On Royal Caribbean’s gigantic liners kids can climb walls, play ball games and go putting – for starters – and you may hardly see them for the rest of the cruise.

Reaching the departure port, of course, adds to your costs. If you live on the Pacific Coast it is more expensive flying to cruise the Caribbean, by far the most popular cruising area. Also it’s hard to get a flight from the West Coast that brings to your port of departure in time to embark the same day. You may have the expense of an East Coast hotel that first night. Those are not flight issues for other distant destinations like Europe for those who can handle red-eye flights.

Next, choose the cruise line. Some lines charge about $100 per person per day which really is extraordinary value when you consider what’s offered: a cabin, meals as good as any you’d get in regular travel and a variety of entertainments. Carnival, for example, offers some entry level cruises and calls itself the Fun Ships. They got that right! Upscale lines might charge as much as $800 per person per day but they offer much more and don’t nickel and dime you to death as some lines do. Silversea Cruises, for instance, stocks your cabin refrigerator with the alcohol of your choice, presents elegant dining and has many complimentary shore excursions. Its ships are small which raises this benefit.

Small ships get in close. With the European river boats you are often tied down right in town and it’s easy for the 300 or so passengers to walk off into their own shore excursion. If you take a Uniworld River Cruises voyage not only will you see Budapest’s Houses of Parliament from your deck chair but you’ll be able to walk to them from where your boat docks. Large boats sometimes have to anchor off shore and tender in which can be tedious for, say, 3000 impatient passengers.

Interesting parts of any cruise are the onboard lectures by knowledgeable experts whether you are sailing the Yangtze with Victoria Cruises, America’s Columbia Gorge with the now defunct Cruise West, or Russia’s Volga with Viking River Cruises.

What about shore excursions? They can, for sure, add considerable costs to your voyage from a low perhaps of $30 to be driven in a bus around, say, Puerto Vallarta up to perhaps $500 per person for the helicopter flights over Alaska’s glaciers. Can you do better privately negotiating with a local tour operator once the ship docks? Possibly, but if you’re in a faraway place with taxi drivers who don’t speak English, the ship may have sailed by the time you belatedly return to the dock. It’s a real risk in, say, South East Asia, where interesting places may be miles from industrial docks along routes that cross many canals. Their bridges may be raised at the very time you need to cross.

We’ve saved money by taking a bus in Cambodia and seeing a farmer taking his pigs to market. We’ve rented a car in Tahiti to save the price of a shore excursion though we passed a car where tourists may have created greater expenses for themselves the previous week. And we declined to pay $55 for afternoon tea at the famous Empress Hotel in Vancouver when we found we could sit on the same patio and nurse the special 1908 cocktail celebrating the hotel’s 100 years – for $10.

But if you’ve spent big bucks to go halfway across the world and the cruise is a once in a lifetime experience does it make sense to dedicate yourself to cutting costs? Time is money and maybe it’s better spent having fun. If a Victoria Cruises boat on the Yangtze offers a side-cruise up the Lesser Gorges of the Daning river, or a Cruceros Australis ship cruising Patagonia a chance, in an inflatable, to get really close, maybe too close, to a glacier that might well calf in front of you, the cost is almost academic: it will never be as cheap for you to have that specific experience than right now when you are already there.

Some excursions are included, some cost extra. The brochures and web sites should make that plain. Most sophisticated cruising passengers anticipate additional charges will add a further 40 percent to their initial cruise booking. The extras come from onboard impulsive purchases, shore excursions, spa treatments, special restaurant bookings, alcohol and soft drinks, taxes and gratuities. Even as cruise lines, in this poor economy, offer important discounts to their regular customers (which is a good reason to develop cruise line loyalty and sail with the same company if you enjoyed your first cruise with it) so they are sneaking in a variety of methods to get more money from you when you come onboard. The first time we took a cruise an announcement sent all passengers on deck to wave goodbye to our departure port. Wait staff moved around handing out smiles and pink drinks with little umbrellas. The last time with the same cruise line, the waiters asked us for our cabin numbers. The free rides were over!