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. We had a special birthday in the family and 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 26 to 85. Pleasing this wide of a range of ages can prove daunting. However, 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 youll 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. There are cruise lines that cater to specific groups or types of cruise passenger. Its 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 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. 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. 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 vcation. Oh yes, do you want to know which cruise we chose? 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 |
