We booked a cruise! Alaskan - next July - on the Magic. All of us first time DCL cruisers. Half of us first time cruisers (me included in that group)
Starting to look at flights and hotels, and checking to see if there’s anything I’m missing when considering whether or not to book or not book through DCL.
For flights - doesn’t seem like there are many perks to booking through DCL. From what I’m seeing it sounds like it might be easier/better to book direct with airline in case we need to handle any delays or cancellations (obviously planning to arrive a day before embarkation). On a non-DCL cruise last year, my sister booked her flights through the cruise line because if there were delays or cancellations, they would handle them and also make sure they got to the next port if they missed embarkation, but I haven’t seen anything about DCL handling that. Any reason booking flights w/ DCL would be a must?
For hotels, seems like main perk is being able to use DCL transportation from the hotel to port - doing that means taking care of some ID checks (so not having to do that at port) and handing over bags (also not having to do that at port). Is that right? Any other reasons to definitely do one of their hotels or definitely don’t worry about doing one of their hotels?
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You are sailing out of Vancouver, and there are several hotels within walking distance of the port. We did that for our cruise with RCL.
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Definitely looking at decent pricing not far from port - that will for sure be the go unless there’s any real reason to do something direct through DCL.
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I’m not sure about Vancouver, but in all the ports we have done, DCL also has a transport from the airport to the port. You don’t need to be flying in that morning to book the transportation to the port through DCL. You just need to get yourselves to the airport & they will take the luggage there, and do the check-in ahead of time there just like from any hotel you booked through. So you don’t technically need to book a hotel through DCL to get transportation perks. And they definitely charge a premium for booking a hotel through them and choose hotels that are on the premium end of prices to begin with.
So I think it will depend on how much you value the perk of them taking care of the luggage or doing the check-in prior to the port. For what’s it worth, all the ports we’ve been to, luggage has been easy and there’s never been more than a 10 or so minute line for check-in, and that’s only in extremely busy cases. But how great that perk is also dependent on how much luggage you bring and if you’d otherwise be walking it to the port.
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We had one instance where it was helpful to have booked everything through Disney and that was our honeymoon - which was supposed to start 9/12/01. With everything going on, it was great to have one place to call to handle everything. But since then, we have always booked our airfare ourselves.
We flew home from San Juan last trip and I was worried since we have always done Port Canaveral. But it was a great experience. We had Disney transport and it went very, very smoothly.
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I’m late to this thread, but if you have not booked a hotel yet @cjandres I would not wait. The World Cup is in Vancouver in July. We are booked July 30-Aug 1 (well after the games) and it was slim pickings for $$$.
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