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Family Cruise Vacation - How we chose ours!
You have a "special' birthday or other special family
event coming up. You want to make the event even more memorable. There would
be a wide range of ages and interests in the family members attending. What
should you do? Plan a family cruise vacation!
We have done this ourselves. There was a "special" birthday in the family
and we wanted to vacation with our grown-up children to celebrate. With careful
consideration for what we might like to do, where we might like to go, and
to provide enough variety in eating (the kids are finicky eaters) and
activities to keep everyone happy, a cruise seemed to best fit the bill.
Family cruises offer one of the very best family vacation packages
available. Consider this: Per person, you pay one price for your cruise
stateroom, all of your meals, some fantastic entertainment and a myriad of
daily activities - not to mention the fabulous ports-of-call!
As it turned out, we had a total of 12 people coming on our family vacation
cruise ranging in age from 25 to 85. Pleasing this wide of a range of ages
can prove daunting. Having been on a cruise or two already, we knew
that cruises offered the best array of options in dining, activities,
entertainment and destinations.
Choosing the right cruise line and cruise itinerary can be somewhat of a
challenge. However, if you approach this task methodically, everything will
fall into place and you'll choose the absolute best cruise for you and your
family.
You will notice that I started by saying to choose "the right cruise line".
This - - believe it or not - - can make or break your family vacation cruise.
There are cruise lines that cater to specific groups or types of cruise
passenger. It's important to identify what type of group your family fits
into.
As mentioned before, our group required variety. Our twenty-something kids
need to have a festive, party atmosphere. Our parents required something
somewhat more sophisticated without being stuffy or pretentious. Many of the
"contemporary" cruise lines offer much of this variety, and only on the
larger cruise ships. We quickly were able to narrow our search to three
cruise lines.
In looking at the cruise line and cruise ship, we carefully scanned over the
amenities and over the listed activities for the specific ships. All three had a good
variety. Each had specific high spots and potential low spots. Even with our
diverse group, we felt that all three cruise lines could offer us a great
family vacation cruise experience.
Next was the itinerary - or destinations where the individual cruises
stopped. These ports-of-call make cruises an extra special vacation value.
Of course, we had a set date that we wanted to be away, so we looked at the
available itineraries for the three cruise lines, including which ships
sailed those itineraries.
We chose the Southern Caribbean for our cruise. All three
cruise lines offered a Southern Caribbean cruise at the time we wanted to
cruise. Each offered different ports-of-call which allowed us to narrow our
search more. We next looked at the cost of the cruise vacation and what
potential discounts/special offers we might receive by booking 6 staterooms.
Now we had all of the information required to make our decision. We first
narrowed our search to three cruise lines. We chose a cruise locale and
looked at the available cruise ships in those cruise lines sailing on our
specified date. Lastly, we compared pricing. (We already had an idea
of price range, so this item was our last consideration.)
As it turned out, we chose the middle priced cruise (before discounts). This
choice had a variety of amenities to cater to our "kids". Our parents would
have a level of sophisticated elegance. And we would have piece of mind in
knowing that we had done "due diligence" in choosing the best cruise for our
family vacation.
We chose Princess
Cruises' ship Golden Princess. Our cruise itinerary:
San Juan, Puerto Rico
St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands
St. Kitts, St. Kitts & Nevis
Grenada
Isla Margarita
Aruba
San Juan
To see more about our cruise ship, see
Golden Princess Cruise Ship. For an
overview of our ports-of-call see
Princess Cruise Line Southern Caribbean
Cruise. For more information regarding our Golden Princess cruise to the
Southern Caribbean stay tuned. We don't leave until April of 2006.
If you have questions regarding choosing the correct cruise line for you,
contact us at info@a1-discount-cruises.com using the subject line
"Questions". We will do our absolute best to help you. For more informative
articles check out our Cruises
Article maps. To purchase and book your cruise on-line, go to our main
Cruise Discounts main page and
click one of the great merchant links there. Then all that's left to do is
to get excited!
Cruise Ships for great
cruise deals by many of the cruise lines!
Caribbean Cruises
Find great deals on Caribbean Cruises aboard the magnificent cruise ships!
Caribbean Cruises Articles for more interesting articles about Caribbean
cruises, destinations, and other topics!
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