Booking a Cruise Is Easy. Booking the Right One Isn't.
Taking a cruise is one of the best ways to see Europe, especially with a group. Booking them is easy, and once you’re on board, there’s only one bag to unpack. You wake up somewhere new every day or two without ever changing hotels.
We’ve taken many cruises throughout our marriage. Some with just the two of us, some with our immediate family, and others with larger groups of family and friends. Each trip has been different and worth it in its own way. There’s plenty to do on board, from pool time and evening entertainment to a quiet lounge if what you’re after is a nap or a good book. However your group likes to spend a day, a cruise ship can usually keep up, which matters even more when you’re traveling with multiple generations.
Our kids' first European cruise, and the ship that started it.
Here’s the part that catches people off guard, though. Booking a cruise is easy. Booking a cruise that actually fits your family is a different question, and a lot of people learn that the hard way.
Before we started our travel agency, friends of ours booked an eleven-day cruise in Europe with a balcony cabin. Sounds great, right? Once on board, they discovered the crew’s smoking area was directly below their balcony, so whenever they were in port and wanted to enjoy the balcony, they were met with cigarette smoke. They ended up avoiding their balcony when arriving or departing port. Their cabin was also near the anchor, so every early morning port arrival came with the anchor chain waking them up.
Other friends booked a European cruise for their extended family: three adults and three children. Once on board, they found the kids’ activities were limited, and most of what was available cost extra. What looked like a good deal at booking turned out to be much less kid-friendly on the trip. They also assumed the ship would offer assistance getting from the dock into Venice on port day. They hadn’t researched it, and spent much of the day figuring it out instead of enjoying the city.
A third family told us a similar story. It was their first cruise, and a relative recommended a cruise line based on their own experience. They booked an Alaska cruise on that cruise line, but it didn’t suit the ages of their family. There were no activities onboard for their kids, and very few kids on the ship. It was clear almost right away that they were on the wrong cruise line and the wrong ship, but by then it was too late.
This dry slides on Norwegian Prima run ten stories down the side of the ship.
None of these families did anything wrong. The couple with the balcony cabin booked through Costco Travel, which is a solid way to get a good price on a cruise, but pricing is about all it gets you. No one was checking deck plans for smoking areas or anchor placement on their behalf. The other family traveling to Europe ran into the same kind of gap in a different spot: no one flagged the extra fees hiding in the activities on the ship or the limited kids’ activities until they were already on board. The family traveling to Alaska was cruising for the first time and didn’t realize the differences between cruise lines or ships.
That’s not meant to scare you away from cruising. It’s meant to point out what’s worth checking before you book: how cruise lines differ from one another, the ship itself, where your cabin sits, and what’s included once you're on board versus what’s going to cost extra. Once you’ve got that sorted out, you can look at where different ships are sailing and find the itinerary that fits your family.
If you’d rather not dig through deck plans, cabin locations, and cruise line differences yourself, that’s the part of the work we do. We’ve done it for our own family and for the groups we’ve traveled with, and it’s why we started Family Tradition Travel Co.
If you’re weighing a cruise for your family and want a second set of eyes on it, send us an email. Tell us who’s traveling and roughly how old everyone is, and we’ll start there. If you'd like to know what working with us costs first, our What It Costs page covers it.
