Cruise Organisation/Planning Advice

[Cruzin Terri]

Is there such a thing as an online cruise planner? I am in the midst of planning our 2 next cruises, both of which are longer than any we have taken previously and have just realised that I am going to have to be much more organised in the way I organise our days. Hitherto, I have relied on typing up an itinerary with each day's activities listed but am wondering whether there is a better way.

 

Daisy,

You started a roll call for this 19-day cruise and have only been there twice. I have tried to keep it going but with so few participants it is hard. I would love some input from you and others and help with planning this cruise. However, I feel like I am talking to myself over there.

 

If we all plan together, perhaps we could come up with some private tours we would like to share. Please come back and help with some conversation and hopefully attract some others to join the roll call.

 

I am new to Oceania and don't want to be bold, but the thread is ready to fall off the first page. Once it does that, we will never get the roll call going.

 

I admit I have not contributed of late, but I have been ill and hospitalized. But still am interested and want to get some participation and hopefully get some private tours together. I have posted a tour for St. Petersburg twice and no one has even responded in any way.

 

Terri

[kazu]

Daisy,

You started a roll call for this 19-day cruise and have only been there twice. I have tried to keep it going but with so few participants it is hard. I would love some input from you and others and help with planning this cruise. However, I feel like I am talking to myself over there.

 

If we all plan together, perhaps we could come up with some private tours we would like to share. Please come back and help with some conversation and hopefully attract some others to join the roll call.

 

I am new to Oceania and don't want to be bold, but the thread is ready to fall off the first page. Once it does that, we will never get the roll call going.

 

I admit I have not contributed of late, but I have been ill and hospitalized. But still am interested and want to get some participation and hopefully get some private tours together. I have posted a tour for St. Petersburg twice and no one has even responded in any way.

 

Terri

 

Terri - a Baltic cruise? You can contact people like Alla Tours and they will book you as an individual if you like. That's the company we used, but I am sure the other top companies do the same thing. The groups are kept relatively small still. Not quite the same as a private tour of course, but a nice size and well done :) Also, if you are doing tours in other Baltic countries, Alla (and many more I believe) offer a discounted price which can be worth taking a look at .

 

Hope this helps.

 

apologies for the thread drift :o

[Cruzin Terri]

Terri - a Baltic cruise? You can contact people like Alla Tours and they will book you as an individual if you like. That's the company we used, but I am sure the other top companies do the same thing. The groups are kept relatively small still. Not quite the same as a private tour of course, but a nice size and well done :) Also, if you are doing tours in other Baltic countries, Alla (and many more I believe) offer a discounted price which can be worth taking a look at .

 

Hope this helps.

 

apologies for the thread drift :o

 

Thanks, Jacqui. I have a company in mind that handles tours for two persons. The cost is high and it would be nice if I could get a few more. However, the way the roll call is going, it looks like that will not happen. It just baffles me when someone starts a roll call and then doesn't come back to participate. Why bother.

Terri

[cbb]

and here's an amen to alla tours for SPB. We had Julia and she was wonderful!

[DaisyUK]

Thank you for all the tips. It is interesting to read about the many different ways you like to organise your time. Like many others, I enjoy the planning (which DH is happy to leave to me). Our cruises to date have largely visited places we have been before and/or will visit again and our focus has been on having an interesting, but relaxing time. Our Baltic cruise will be a little different because we shall be visiting some ports and countries which are new to us and which we may not visit again. The reason I was looking for some kind of spreadsheet or planning tool is that I would love to be able to have an 'at-a-glance' record of what is happening each day. I want to make the most of our time, but don't want to cram in so much that we have no time to relax.

 

LeeJnd4 - I would love a copy of your spreadsheet. My email address is setonanderson at btinternet.com.

 

Cruzin Terri - I think that the roll call will become more active as we get closer to the date of our cruise, which is still such a long way off. I am sorry to hear you have been ill and hope you are making a good recovery. We are in the minority when it comes to excursions, in that we use the ship's tours wherever there is one that interests us and tend to DIY it on our own the rest of the time.

[PaulMCO]

Everyone has their own way. Spreadsheets for me are too time consuming. I am an expert at using them -- but for just entering text it is a waste of their power as a calculation tool.

 

I do a lot of traveling for a living so I try to keep the same method that involves my PC and the use of Outlook. When you book 15 to 20 trips a year consistency does help.

 

1) I have a cruise directory on my PC which is a Surface Pro II (lightweight pad type PC). The sub-directories are based on the subject - cruise docs, hotel reservations, and tours with port names (Hong Kong, Phuket, KL, Singapore). I store on these directories pdf copies of the flight arrangement, hotels and tours.

 

2) My chief organizer is Outlook. Outlook Exchange is great since it is synchronized with my personal PC, my office PC and iPhone, I make a change on one and it gets automatically synchronized on the other.

 

 

• Airline bookings and hotels are easy as most booking have a save to outlook as part of the reservation.
  
• Oceania and private tours are easy -- just copy paste the itinerary into the date and time. You can easily set the time to correspond to Hong Kong local time and set a warning for 30 minutes before. You can also attached PDF's of mails or documents to the appointment.
  
• Polo and Toscana bookings are easily added when you make a booking at the 60 or 45 day mark. In fact you can set a reminder in outlook for the proper day to make these in advance.
  
• Outlook Cabinet. For all of the emails from my TA, Hotels, Airlines, and private tours. I use the file cabinet to store these. Again I use a similar structure as my PC directory dividing it up into Cruise Docs, Hotels, Ports etc...
  
• Paper -- yes I carry paper copies of stuff. But the key ones, being Oceania Invoice, TA Invoice, Insurance Policy, Hotel and Airline Bookings.
  

These are just my way - there is no right way.

[redshine]

would love it if you could send me a copy

leaving in 2 weeks and want to get organized

 

dayswim28(@)yahoo.com

[Leejnd4]

FYI, it appears this thread has been moved from the Oceania forum to the "ask a cruise question" forum.

 

It also appears that a number of posts have been deleted - my post in which I described the Excel planner that I use, as well as a bunch more people asking for me to send them my cruise planner spreadsheet.

 

So...here's the deal. I was offering this planner to my fellow Oceania cruisers, with whom I was engaged in a discussion on how we plan out our cruises. I was happy to send it out to the few Oceania cruisers who asked - it went out to 5 or 6 people. However, I never intended this to be a blanket offer to all Cruise Critic members...I simply wouldn't be able to keep up with that. And it seems it may be some kind of violation to even talk about it anyway, since my post about it was deleted. Lord knows I don't want to violate any CC Terms of Service! :eek: I learned a long time ago how severely TOS violators are dealt with, and I do NOT wanna go there again. :p

 

So, I apologize if you are an O cruiser, and asked me to send it to you, and I didn't.

 

If any O cruisers wish to have further discussions about how we plan our cruises, and you happen to see me in another thread in the O forum, and want to chat about the Excel planner I use, feel free to jump in. I love to talk about cruising, and would be happy to tell you about it. :D

[Cruisin' Chick]

"While a cruise planner online is fine for some folks, I like my "notes" on paper so I can take them with me when I go off of the ship"

 

we do the same, and have met people who were bummed because they forgot to recharge batteries and their online "notes" for that port were unusable.

 

There is something to be said for paper!!!

 

That's how I see it too. I would be frustrated if everything I had researched was on an electronic device and then had a problem with it. With a hard copy, I can put the appropriate pages in my purse each day so I can refer to them.

 

I do a lot of planning ahead of time. Actually am planning out a road trip (we're picking up our college kid during a break for her) and touring an area a few hundred miles from her college. Among hubby, the girl, and I are throwing ideas out at each other -- she via Skype. But like our trip going to take her there, we may end up making changes (we hit a rare heat wave in one city and decided to move on...so we're going to return for a second try).

 

For cruises, I do much of the research for ports for our family using guidebooks and tourism websites. Sometimes we might do a ship's excursion. But we don't plan out every minute as we're on a cruise to relax, and to us, the ports are just a bonus. In fact, last cruise, in one port, we planned an excursion, and then after lunch, the three of us were going to one historic site. But during lunch, hubby decided he wanted to go for a walk along the beach instead (and it's one that we've been to a few times before).

 

We don't plan out sea days at all. I'll look over the next day's newsletter and tell hubby about a show. And if the teen wanted to join us -- she loves the entertainment -- she'll let us know.

 

But I use Word to copy and paste info I find about the ports. And if we need to travel to start a cruise (when not going from our home port), I will copy and paste hotel info so I can narrow them what we'll book as well as flight or train info.

 

Before the cruise, I'll try to condense down the info to a page per port if possible and print those out.