cruise "deals"

[labguides]

NY Times indicated that there are great cruise deals for Europe. What have you seen? I am open to almost anywhere except Baltic as we have done that.

[Mary Ellen]

I saw a GREAT deal a few weeks ago for 20-days in the Med starting at about $1000/pp. That only lasted for a few days though. Just check the HAL site under 'Special Offers' to see if there is anything that appeals to you.

[Essiesmom]

Check my reply on your thread on the Princess board. EM

[Lesinindy]

We almost went after a Med cruise recently. From what I saw the cruise ran less than $100.00 a day. Really nice ports and great ship.

 

Then came reality..........

 

I priced out the airfare from Indy to Rome and a couple other locations and found that the airfare was as high as the cruise. That is the deal breaker for me. I hate those little seats and the cramped cabins, but to suffer and pay something like $1,300.00 for the privilege was not in the cards for me.

 

When looking at the bargains; check out the airfare.

 

I forgot to add that airfare was per person, I just checked again and Indy to Rome round trip = $1,394.00

[Smartcookie]

There are AMAZING deals on European/Mediterranean cruises...unfortunately the airfares are very high, BUT, flights on Delta the second half of August just dropped considerably.

 

I think European cruises have never been better priced.

[gregdude]

I would price HAL air they usually are able to do much better than I can out of NJ.

[iancal]

We are going to book a balcony on Equinox for a 10 day Med in Oct. Nets out to just over $1150 (after ta obcs) for a balcony guarantee.

 

We wanted to try Noordam, but we can't pass this up and Equinox is a beautiful ship.

[FRANKIEDNYC]

:) We booked a 45 day R/T from Ft Lauderdale Med cruise from Oct 28 to Dec 12. on Maasdam. There are no International flights. Got a nice oceanview cabin on the main deck and with a couple of shipboard credits it's costing less than $100.00 a day. I think that a heck of a deal!

[Randyk47]

We've seen some great deals on Med cruises for this year. In fact, even though we are booked for a Med cruise next March we actually at least looked at the recent HAL offers with thought we might change our plans. We finally decided not to change but it wasn't because the offers weren't great, more that we couldn't make all the piece parts of the trip and work requirements come together to go on another cruise this year. As for air fare there's no doubt about it, it's expensive. I don't remember the exact cost for two coach tickets say for round trip from San Antonio to Rome but it was close to $3,000 and business class was around $8,000. One of the disadvantages for us is living in a city that's not a major hub and even driving to Dallas, which is really not all that close, doesn't save us much money once we factor in time and fuel costs, etc., to drive up there. For our cruise next March, which requires flying into Barcelona to catch the cruise and out of Istanbul at the end, we decided to cash in our American Airlines awards miles. It's going to be one heck of a series of flights but the bottom line is that we'll be out 200,000 awards miles and a little under $800 for taxes and fees for two first/business class tickets.