Let’s say you want to book a 2027 cruise on opening day to lock in the lowest possible rate BUT you could wait about a month until your next cruise to make a new placeholder reservation and get that 10% discount instead. What would you do?
Is there any way to apply a placeholder to a cruise you’ve already booked? Ideally you book on opening day and then retroactively apply the placeholder a month later, but IDK if such wizardry is possible.
I would book opening day. If you then get a placeholder booked, you can apply that but it might be applied to the current booking rate. I use a TA and I let her do all the calling to make those changes. I’m not sure how quickly prices will rise, but I’d rather lock in the lowest rate on opening day and then use the placeholder after if I needed to.
I always aim to have a placeholder ready for the opening days where I know I am looking for a cruise.
In reality that doesn’t always happen but I still do always book on opening day. A month hopefully won’t have a huge impact on most sailings so you should be able to still get savings by calling to apply it but I would double check what the going rate is for the same stateroom category before you call because if it is a hot sailing that is selling fast you may be better off with your opening day pricing. And they cannot retroactively apply the placeholder to an existing booking. It is always whatever rate it is that day and they will cancel the opening day one and convert the reservation # that you got with your placeholder to a confirmed sailing.
You do want to make sure you take the 10% off of the fare minus the port fees and then add the price of the port fees back on after to see the price comparisons.