Cabin Choice—How Much You Pay

This is my third posting on cabins. See the prior two below.

I saw a tv documentary once on airlines. It took a sample flight from New York to LA and compared all of the fares paid for coach seats. Of the 250 travelers, there were about 90 distinct prices…from a low of $90 to a high of $900. The $900 was more than many of the travelers paid in first class. Some airlines have tried to simplify their rate structure, but they cannot make money when they do so. They have to try to get as much as possible when someone is will to pay a lot because they absolutely must be on that flight, and they discount if that is what it takes to fill the seat.

Cruise cabins work the same way. One passenger in an economy cabin asked some ladies with a similar type of cabin what they paid. He was shocked to learn that the two of them had paid about $50,000 more than he and his wife had paid. The ladies travel agent seemed to have taken advantage of the ladies.

One observation is that a travel agent CAN get you a lower price than the cruise line will offer directly. This seems backwards at first because the travel agent is one extra person in the chain who has to take a profit. However, cruises offer deals to travel agents because they need the agencies’ help to book out all the rooms. Further, without travel agencies, the cruise line might have to fund a much bigger and costly marketing department. Finally, when you book through a travel agent, the cruise line can defer all our your pesky follow up questions back to your travel agent to handle. In our case, we originally booked this trip through Princess directly. Later we were referred by a friend to his travel agent who had a cancel with Princess and assign the booking to him. We got a 4% reduction in cost…a lot of money for a trip this big.

Second observation is that booking early may get you the special room and trip that you want, but you’ll likely pay a higher price. If you can be flexible on both type of room and which cruise, some opportunities for lower price may open up as the cruise time gets closer and the cruise line wants to fill up the empty rooms. One good time to find this type of opportunity is when the final payment is due for the cruise. In our case that was 90 or 120 prior to departure. I understand there were a number of booking s for our cruise that were made a year or so ago, but cancelled at the final payment date when the downturn in the economy caused a greater than normal number of bookings to cancel.