Cruises aren’t cheap. Sometimes, your travel advisor can score you a great last-minute deal, sure, but generally, once you’ve stayed in a balcony level cabin, there’s no going back to the interior ones, which are often the biggest bargains. So after you spend all that money, plus budget for airfare, it begs the question: Do you really need to book a pre- or post-cruise hotel stay? Or is this a ploy to get you to max out your budget.
The short answers are YES, you should absolutely consider a pre- and/or post-cruise hotel stay for your own benefit. Here are the reasons why.
Extra Days May Cost Less Than You Think
Cruise ship itineraries are set to depart on certain days of the month or week, and are routed for maximum efficiency, with planning that begins well over a year in advance for the cruise line. This means that there’s no flexibility whatsoever – if you want a certain itinerary at a certain price point, you simply have to make it work. And that means flying in to make it on board or flying out when they dock at their final port of call. You simply have to get there before they pull up the gangway and you can’t get an earlier flight home if they haven’t reached shore.
All of that means tight scheduling and coordination across thousands of vacationers on airlines all around the world. It also means flights may cost more for those peak sailing windows, sometimes by hundreds.
However, if you have some flexibility with your time off, you can have your travel advisor check out what dates flights might be a little cheaper. With the money you might save by flying on a different date, you can put that win into the kitty for a hotel stay.
Pre-Cruise Stay Pros
Arriving in their port city before you hop aboard is a fantastic option experienced cruisers know is a good call. It gives you time to settle into vacation mode … and takes all the pressure off worrying about flight delays and missing boarding times. Because as awful as it is to take a red-eye to then have to run around immediately to make it to another form of transit, few things are worse than that carefully balanced time-juggling act of taking a connecting flight to transfer to a port to get in line for the ship to be derailed by ripple-effect delays. In fact, the only thing worse is missing your ship’s departure, which could result in missing the cruise entirely!
A buffer of even just a single night alleviates all that pressure and breaks up travel so that you can start their cruise already relaxed and ready to enjoy all of the amenities on board. Otherwise, travel fatigue can put a damper on their start and add more stress to have to decompress from.
Post-Cruise Stay Advantages
Give yourself some time to stretch out your sea legs … you’ll definitely appreciate the extra breathing a hotel room gives you after a week of being in a cruise ship cabin! Plus, the breath you can take from the breakneck pace of destination-hopping those highly efficient itineraries are known for. And it saves you the frenetic, hectic, and anxiety-inducing runaround of having to disembark in order to make it from the cruise port to the airport in time for a flight … or of sitting around at an airport all day waiting for your return flight home.
Another emotional benefit of opting for a post-cruise stay is that it can help cushion the blow of that dreaded vacation hangover. It can be mentally tiring to go straight from the euphoria of a vacation, and honestly, kind of depressing to count down the days between shipboard life and real life. With that adjustment period, it eases that transition.
A Second Chance
There are a few great reasons to book a round-trip cruise itinerary, and the cost savings and greater ease of booking round-trip airfare are always a compelling argument. But the tough call, then, is whether it’s better to book a pre- or post-cruise stay in that port city? After all, is there a point in stopping there more than once?
But we can say on good authority, if you have the time and budget, you definitely ought to do both.
A whirlwind stay before the cruise is great for an overview, and it’s easy enough to think that with a comprehensive city tour (like what your travel advisor can book for you through ALG Vacations®), you’ll get to see everything. And you will. But the problem is, that go, go, go pace you’re setting for yourself pre-cruise means you won’t have time to take a deep dive.
On the other hand, booking a tour pre-cruise gives you a good lay of the land so that you can spend more time in the places you were thinking about the whole time you were on the ship, and lets you hit up anything you missed beforehand. For instance, you might make friends with someone with a relative in that city who knows the best bar you need to visit, a local favorite day trip destination, or has connections to a special restaurant you might not have been able to get into. It’d be a shame to let that new knowledge go to waste! Or you might want to actually mosey around the city’s most famous museum, go inside that gorgeous church, or take your time shopping for luxury items.
And if you’re embarking and disembarking from different ports? Well, then bookending your cruise with a day or two more on land is an obvious decision.
To Battle Fatigue
As mentioned, cruise itineraries move fast. Your time in port is limited to a few hours, so to get the most out of each stop, you need to stay in motion … which can take a lot out of you. That phenomenon is called cruise fatigue, and it’s just as real as jet lag – something else you’ll have to fight if you hop directly on the ship from the plane and back.
But wait! Adding to that transit exhaustion and crankiness, you still need a ride to and from the port. So it’s actually a process that starts with your ride to the airport, flight, then another ride, then the cruise ship terminal. Whew!
Booking a hotel between your time on the ship helps make the days more digestible and easier to handle. Plus, ALGVPro travel advisors can easily book transfers for you from the airport to the hotel – typically a much shorter ride – and then to the cruise port and vice versa, so you don’t have to deal with the headache of trying to navigate public transit with luggage, sketchy taxis, or gamble with rideshare availability. The amount of stress that’s reduced by having travel advisors handle the logistics for you in advance is huge for setting the right tone for a wonderful vacation.
To learn more about how ALG Vacations® certified ALGVPro travel advisors can make your vacation experience seamless, visit www.TravelAdvisorsGetYouThere.com.
