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Some travel agents will offer onboard credit based on the amount you spend on your Disney cruise. This is credit you can use toward drinks, spa treatments, excursions or anything else you can charge to your room. Cruises are easy to enjoy but can be complicated to plan if you are new to this type of travel. You want someone who can help you pick the right cabin type and location for your group and keep track of when you can snag those onboard activities you really want. When you are on the ship, you will not need cash or a credit card — all incidentals, purchases and services will be charged to your cabin folio. Your Key to the World card (or your DisneyBand+ on Disney Wish) serves as your onboard payment method.
Disney vs. Royal Caribbean: Cabins
Pregnant woman medevaced from cruise ship highlights health risks of cruising while pregnant - Cruise Blog
Pregnant woman medevaced from cruise ship highlights health risks of cruising while pregnant.
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This means you’ll be able to have as many alcoholic drinks as you’d like, including wine, beer and liquor. The biggest enticement here is that Disney’s ships all offer Disney-branded entertainment, so if you’re a fan of, say, "Frozen," "The Lion King" or Mickey Mouse, you’ll have a blast on a Disney cruise. Those sorts of prices will only be available during the offseason, such as in mid-to-late January and early February or for repositioning cruises as the ship moves from, say, Puerto Rico to Florida. That same cruise during spring break can cost double or more, so the more date flexibility you have, the better. On these shortest cruises, concierge-level cabins and access start at a little over $5,000 for a family of four. If it's a sea day in a warm-weather destination, and you're bound for the top deck, that means looking like you're going to the beach.
Disney Dream
Voyager-, Freedom-, Oasis-, and Icon-class ships offer ice skating shows in an onboard rink, while select Vision- and Radiance-class ships feature evening aerial shows in the atrium. When it comes to dining, Disney and Royal Caribbean take somewhat different approaches. Both offer main dining venues and buffets that are included with the fare, plus extra-fee restaurants, beverage packages, celebrity chef partnerships, room service and kids’ menus. Both have at least one formal night per cruise, but that's where the similarities end. On select ships, both cruise lines try to enhance the inside cabin experience with virtual views. On Disney Dream and Disney Fantasy, Disney offers Magical Portholes, which are video screens that look like porthole windows and display real-time views enhanced with animated characters.
Cruise line showdown: Comparing Carnival, Disney and Royal Caribbean for families
Kids who want more time with the Disney characters might be interested in the Royal Court Royal Tea — a tea party with characters for kids ages 3 to 12. According to planDisney (Disney's online resource for vacation-planning tips), the cost is $220 per child and $69 for anyone 13 and up. Each tea party includes a selection of tea and a two-course meal; every child gets an assortment of gifts. Kids can meet and play with their favorite Disney characters and participate in activities like karaoke. Family-friendly sun decks with pools, waterslides, splash zones and wading pools are also included in the cost.
You can get married on a cruise ship
On these two smaller ships, 70% of passenger cabins have ocean views or verandahs. Disney's Castaway Cay is more of a traditional cruise line private island with beach areas (snorkels, tubes and floats are available for rent), a small floating waterslide complex and games such as volleyball. On all three of the ships in our comparison, you're going to feel the crowds at times (just ask TPG Family founder Summer Hull, aka Mommy Points, who recently wrote about the pool area pileup she saw during a Disney sailing).
A hair dryer is provided in every cabin for your convenience, but you may bring your own as long as it meets the guidelines above. It's forbidden in cabins and on cabin balconies, and those who violate this rule will face a $250 cleaning fee. Disney Cruise Line adds a service gratuity of $14.50 per person per day to final bills. If you are unhappy with the service you receive, you can lower this amount. This club does not utilize parent sign-in and -out, so you need to trust your kid if they are coming to Edge. If your 10-to-12-year-old child visits Edge, they can also play at the Oceaneer Lab and Oceaneer Club, so they have options.
Choose Disney if You Don't Want to Be Nickeled and Dimed on Food -- and Like Whimsical Venues
We ate room service out there, drank wine in the chairs, watched the ship enter and leave the ports, and even interacted with Pluto onshore at Castaway. Your keys will be stuck to the outside of your door and your luggage will come to your door by dinner time. Don’t be surprised if they don’t all come at one time as ours came in a couple batches. It was hard to get a table, so we brought our food out to the pool deck which had some empty spots. While the ship is large and beautiful, I do think that a lot of the fits and finishes are dated. They also limit each cruise on the number of kids in each age category that can be on board at a time.
Know that once your child turns 8, you have the option of giving them self-checkout privileges. While kids up to 12 are welcome in the main Oceaneer Club, they may start moving up to the tween club by the time they are 10 years old. Your kids don't need an appointment to pop in here; they can come anytime from open to close — and the club stays open pretty late. The option for those still in swim diapers is some splash areas, such as Nemo's Reef and Dory's Reef. These lines can get long, so I recommend riding first thing when you board if the port is warm enough. All of Disney Cruise Line's ships have some kind of waterslide on board.
Your cruise cost will include your stateroom, dining, entertainment, access to pools and other recreation, youth clubs, a visit to Disney’s Private Island(s), plus access to nightclubs and lounges. Perhaps because Disney Cruise Line has far fewer ships to fill than Royal Caribbean, its prices are generally much higher on similar itineraries. For example, at press time, the cheapest seven-night Caribbean cruise you can book on Disney Cruise Line starts at $1,449 per person, based on double occupancy and not including taxes and fees.
You can view the currently available dates for Disney Cruises 2024 and Disney Cruises 2025 in our guides. After viewing the dates be sure to come back and request a FREE quote from our travel partner for your cruise. For a limited time, Mickey Visit readers get up to a $400 onboard credit. Disney has previously offered Bermuda and Canada/New England cruises from northeastern U.S. home ports but does not currently have any on its schedule. Disney Cruise Line unsurprisingly attracts a lot of families, especially families with little kids in that princess-worshipping sweet spot, as well as multigenerational families. However, the line also attracts its fair share of adult couples, friends and families with grown children.
We are in South Carolina and are lucky enough to be able to drive to Port Canaveral so we focused on cruises that left from that location. After throwing around a lot of different ideas – and actually booking and then canceling a trip to Yellowstone – we settled on a Disney cruise as being the most child-friendly possible option for this age. Other than excursions, watersports equipment rentals, and a little souvenir shopping, there aren’t really any extra charges to incur on the island. Newly unveiled is Hideaway Beach, an adults-only section with its own infinity pool, sandy beach, and beachside bungalows with plunge pools.
The cocktails were kind of sickly sweet for me, so retrospectively I wish I had grabbed glasses of champagne instead of the neon blue cocktail. Our cruise had two special nights – the 25th anniversary night, and pirate night. I feel like this is one of the biggest things you are paying for when you pay premium for a Disney cruise – really really good service, very clean facilities, and just a very child friendly atmosphere. I pre-paid for the photo package, so about halfway through the cruise, I decided to start waiting in these long lines to get photos with characters.
On Disney, meanwhile, a three-night cruise departing from Port Canaveral and heading to the Bahamas is a minimum of $1,993. The biggest difference when it comes to Disney versus Royal Caribbean is fleet size. Disney Cruise Line has just five ships, while Royal Caribbean boasts 26 ships in its fleet. This may influence which products we review and write about (and where those products appear on the site), but it in no way affects our recommendations or advice, which are grounded in thousands of hours of research. Our partners cannot pay us to guarantee favorable reviews of their products or services. Whether you are on a three-night trip to Castaway Cay or a bigger crossing to the South Pacific, a Disney cruise is a special vacation that actually feels like a vacation.
When you choose to apply (and are approved) for a new credit card through our site, we may receive compensation from our partners, and this may impact how or where these products appear. Please view our advertising policy and product review methodology for more information. While Carnival doesn't have a private island of its own, two of the stops on Carnival Breeze's itinerary are private port developments built by its parent company that come with their own pool areas and more.
Disney's contender in the market is Disney Fantasy, the line's newest ship. Labadee is a private resort on Haiti’s northern coast, offering an array of adventures, including Adrenaline Beach, Dragon’s Beach, Nellie’s Beach, Columbus Cove, and Buccaneer’s Bay. An exclusive Barefoot Beach Club is reserved for Pinnacle Club members, and the resort features a Town Square. In response to ongoing tensions in Haiti, marked by armed attacks on citizens, Royal Caribbean has extended the suspension of all visits to the private resort of Labadee through May 2024.
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