Are you thinking about making a cruise booking? I can help you to avoid cruise problems by showing you ten cruise ship booking mistakes to avoid. Keep watching to the end for five bonus mistakes to avoid once you’re onboard.
When you book a cruise, you’re optimistic about having a great holiday, relaxing away from work, and stepping away from the realities of life for a while. But you don’t want to make the mistakes I’m going to tell you about when booking, or you may find your cruise isn’t the relaxing break you expected.
Today I have ten tips for booking your cruise, to avoid some common mistakes, and at the end I have five bonus tips for making your cruise truly luxurious.
- Not looking for discounts
- Automatically accepting cabin upgrades
- Assuming packages are good value
- Not buying travel insurance
- Paying extra to select a cabin
- Not choosing a cruise line that suits you
- Booking at the wrong time
- Not considering if you are more interested in the ports or the ship
- Augomatically booking cruise ship shore excursions
- Bonus tips: don’t make these mistakes after you’ve booked!
Not looking for discounts
Don’t make the mistake of not checking for discounts before you hit the book button. I usually book through the cruise line website but before I do I check sites like the USA-based Vacations to Go and local travel agent websites to ensure I’m not missing out on any discounts or additional benefits such as onboard credit. You can also use the Honey plugin in your browser, which will search for discount codes before you complete your booking.
And don’t forget cashback sites – sign up to all of them and install their browser plugins. There are heaps of them. I googled “cashback sites Australia” to find all the ones I could access. I’ll put some links below, but you may have different ones where you are.
Cashback sites will usually give you a percentage of your payment back into your cashback account, and when you get to a certain amount you can transfer that cash to your bank account. Free money!
Automatically accepting cabin upgrades
The booking process will sometimes include a tick box to say you’ll accept cabin upgrades. This sounds great, doesn’t it? But it can sometimes be NOT great! If you’re particular about your cabin location or even the specific cabin, what the cruise line calls an upgrade can sometimes be a DOWN grade!
The upgrade may be from a fore or aft cabin within a quiet location to a midship cabin with an obstructed view under the pool deck – noise alert! So, unless you really don’t mind which cabin you’re in be wary of ticking this box.
Assuming packages are good value
Most cruise lines offer packages that include drinks and possibly wifi and other benefits. Sounds great and they should be good value, right? Well, they might be… but they might not! Remember that the corporations behind cruise lines are profit making entities, answerable to their shareholders, and they aren’t going to offer something that doesn’t help them to make money in some way.
Always look into what you get in the package and what you would pay for if you paid for the individual items. I showed how I do this for a Princess Cruises package in my video about cruise line drink packages. You need to be honest with yourself about what you truly need to spend on your cruise to have a great time. For me, I love the feeling that I don’t have to worry about my onboard account ticking up with each drink I order but if you don’t drink a lot, don’t need wifi, or maybe you have high status with the cruise line and get discounted wifi, consider if you really need the package.
Not buying travel insurance
Sometimes when you book a cruise the cruise line will offer you travel insurance. Be wary of buying this insurance – it only includes your cruise and not any of the travel before or after it. That might suit you but always read the terms and conditions of insurance before you buy.
And don’t EVER make the mistake of NOT buying travel insurance. I talk about a very serious incident that happened to Michael when we were in New York, in one of my YouTube videos. In short, Michael is pretty much blind in his right eye and his left eye has 5% vision. In New York one year his left eye’s retina detached – not just a small tear like most people with detachments experience, but an almost complete detachment. He was told he needed surgery ASAP to save the sight in that eye. Medical treatment in the US is not cheap but our travel insurance came through for us and we avoided having to pay over $30,000 US dollars. On the plus side, being in New York he got to have his surgery done by one of the world’s best retinal surgeons!
And do read the fine print, it’s tedious, I know, but you need to make sure you’re covered when you expect to be. When Michael got sick on his way back from the US last year, we had to stopover in Auckland for two days so he could be treated in hospital – yes, it’s always Michael causing the drama! We’d been away for 38 days and the fine print in the insurance policy said we weren’t insured for over 35 days unless we let them know. They wouldn’t pay our expenses. Luckily New Zealand has reciprocal medical care provisions with Australia, so it was only the hotel I stayed in plus a few meals and taxi rides. But we learnt not to make that mistake again!
Paying extra to select a cabin
I see this one as the flip side of the second tip, about accepting upgrades. Again, this depends on how particular are about your cabin and its location. Some people don’t care and are happy to let the cruise line choose their cabin, within a particular category. We usually do this – we book a guaranteed balcony or a guaranteed inside room and let the cabin location be a surprise. And we’ve never had a problem with the cabin we’ve been allocated – on Norwegian Prima they put us in an accessible cabin, which seemed a bit odd, but I guess no one needed it and it was very roomy, particularly the bathroom, so it felt like a win for us.
But if you want to choose your own cabin most cruise lines will charge you extra per person. If you’re happy to go with the flow and take the risk of a cabin where you’ll feel the movement of the ship more, or there might be an obstructed view, or it might be located under the pool deck or over the theatre, you can save that extra money.
Not choosing a cruise line that suits you
I won’t go into detail about choosing the right cruise line for you – I recently did a video on the differences between cruise lines – but be aware that if you don’t consider what you are looking for from your cruise you may be disappointed.
Some cruise lines are quiet and don’t have heaps of activities or late-night drinking and dancing. Some cruise lines are better for families. And some are best for people who want to eat, drink and be merry. Choose the wrong one and you might feel bored, or out of place.
Booking at the wrong time
The recommendations for booking are to always book early or late. By which I mean, either book when the cruise line first releases the cruises for that date or wait until after the final payment date.
If you book two years in advance when the cruises are released, you’re paying in today’s money and are likely to get a good price. Down the track prices may go up with inflation, or when the cruise starts filling up.
And if you wait until after the final payment date, which is usually 90 days before the cruise, people who weren’t able to make the final payment will forfeit their cabins and the cruise line will be trying to sell all the empty cabins, so the price is likely to drop.
I have to be honest, I’m pretty impulsive when it comes to booking cruises so I’d find it hard to wait until after final payment date in case I missed out, but some people swear by it.
If you enjoy our content and would like to see it continuing, please support us.
Any of these would be great: subscribing to our YouTube channel, signing up for our email newsletters, becoming a Patreon member, or buying us a hot chocolate (yum) on Kofi.
Or you can visit Mardi’s Etsy store and see if anything takes your fancy!
Not considering if you are more interested in the port or the ship
Some people love having heaps of ports during their cruise, some people like to enjoy the ship and relax onboard. And some people like both! We love relaxing on a ship but there are times when the ports are the focus.
Before you book think about what you’re looking for. We have two cruises booked this year, both are to New Zealand and go to almost the same ports. But the first one we booked for the ship, so we could get away and relax without pressure on us – there was a tragedy in Michael’s family, and he needs to decompress. So, we plan to mostly stay onboard for that cruise, and we booked a Retreat suite on Celebrity.
The other one is on Princess in December, and we have a standard balcony. On that cruise we plan to do excursions in most of the ports and enjoy that side of the cruise.
When we were looking for the relaxing cruise, we thought about doing one in the Australian Kimberley, which is high on our to do list. But we realised that it would involve lots of early mornings and excursions in Zodiacs and that while we want to do that eventually it isn’t what Michael needs right now.
Automatically booking cruise ship shore excursions
So, you’ve booked a cruise and paid your deposit and you’re eagerly looking at the excursions offered by the cruise line. But before you commit to any of those consider booking them through a third party. They’re usually cheaper, and people often report a better experience, in a smaller group or getting a more detailed tour.
One benefit of ship excursions is that you’re extremely unlikely to have the ship leave without you if you don’t make it back from the excursion in time. So be mindful if you do your own thing or a third-party tour to remember the all-aboard time and plan to return well before that, or risk appearing on YouTube in a pier-runner video, or worse, missing the ship altogether.
How do you know what’s best? We prefer to do ship excursions in ports that are unfamiliar to us – ones where we don’t speak the language or there might be safety issues. But in other ports we will book a third-party excursion. Our favourite providers are Viator and Shore Excursions Group, which I’ll link below. Shore Excursions Group says they have a guaranteed return to ship, which may alleviate some anxiety about potentially missing the boat 😹
Paying in full before final payment date
If you pay in full before the final payment date, you’re allowing the cruise line to earn interest on YOUR money. Keep it in the bank and earn your own interest! But there’s another reason not to pay early.
If the fare drops in between your booking and the final payment, you can often ask that the cruise line re-fare your booking, to get the lower rate. You can set alerts for fare drops on sites like Cruise Watch and Cruise Line. I’ll link them below.
We did an Oceania cruise last year that we saved over $3,000 Australian per person when the fare dropped before final payment!
Bonus tips: other mistakes to avoid
Now that you know what to avoid when booking your cruise, here’s some other mistakes you don’t want to make!
Avoid arriving in the departure port on the day of the cruise. Depending how you are travelling and how far away it is you should arrive one to two days early. When we cruised from Montreal Canada last year, we arrived two and a half days early. I will admit to breaking this one when we cruise from Sydney though, there’s many flights from Canberra to Sydney daily and if that fails there are buses that take about three hours and if that fails, we can always drive! So, we usually fly into Sydney on the day of the cruise. Some rules are made to be broken!
Don’t forget to put your phone in aeroplane mode once you get onboard. If your phone connects to the maritime network, it can cost a fortune to receive an email or a text message!
Plan not to buy toiletries and over the counter medications on board. The prices are sky high! Take your own.
Don’t buy bottled water onboard. The cruise line will have water available for free, usually in the buffet but some ships have water bottle filling stations on most of the decks. And if you need to, the water out of the taps is perfectly drinkable so feel free to fill a water bottle in your bathroom.
If you are going onshore in port, make sure you check that your phone is showing the correct time – sometimes ship time is different to port time and your phone will usually automatically set itself to port time. And take a photo of the daily newsletter with the all-aboard time and the port details – there’s contact details there for the port agent. If something happens and you’re delayed getting back call them. And if the worst happens and the ship leaves without you, they are the ones who will help you get to the next port to reboard.
If you’ve enjoyed this, read my post on what NOT to pack for a cruise, and this one about some sneaky cruise ship secrets!
Links to products
✈️🛳️ When we travel, we use the following (may be affiliate links):
📱 Phone data: AloSIM eSIMs. Use code 7NBZZYI
🔐 Data and device security: NordVPN
🎟️ Tours and tickets: Viator
🧳 Away luggage. Get $40 off and we get a commission if you use this link
🏷️ Air Tags have helped us find lost luggage
🛍️ Mardi’s favourite toiletry bag
🧴Larger containers to decant toiletries into
⏰ Philips Hue 2 can be used as a sunrise lamp
🌅 Philips Sunrise alarm clock
🪝 Suction hooks for additional hotel storage
🧊 Packing cubes
🪞 Folding lighted makeup mirror:
🪭 Handheld fan for warmer climates
💍 We use this hanging jewellery organiser as a travel medications organiser
🎧 Airfly allows Bluetooth headphones to connect to in-flight entertainment
🧳 Level8 luggage
🏨 Expedia for booking hotels
🚢 Shore Excursions Group for booking port tours on cruises
About
We are Mardi and Michael Linke. We’ve been travelling together for over 25 years and we love to share our experiences, showing the places we go and reviewing hotels, airlines and cruises.
Our main content is on YouTube. Click the image above to see it!
