Pleasant Surprise on Cruise Economics

We have more money left in our accounts after the cruise than I had planned upon…a pleasant surprise. The apparent reason may be insightful for any of you who might be on the fence on whether or not to take a major cruise.

In preparation for our cruise, I set up a second checking account in addition to the main one that we have had. The base account handles 95% of the monthly bills with automatic payments. I established the second account to handle any new or unexpected charges that came in while we were on the cruise. I had a person capable of using this second, temporary account to pay these types of bills. I could use e-mail with her while I was on the ship for any questions about these bills.

This worked fine. There were two situations that came up that were a problem. First, we double paid a property tax bill. That was fixed with one of the two payments returned to us. Second, we had a mortgage for which an update of the insurance policy did not get to the lender, so the lender threatened to buy a policy at my expense, and charge me for it. They actually did this, but I was able to straighten the situation out after I returned and get the unnecessary policy reversed out without charge.

I funded the basic checking account prior to the cruise with funds that would cover my normal “at home” monthly expenses, plus an extrapolation of the “on board” spending rate that I saw from previous short cruises. I put sufficient funds in the temporary account to cover worst-case surprises.

We spent a lot less than this “worse case” scenario for which I had protected, and even substantially less than my “most likely” spending expectation.

Two things are responsible for this: “at home” and “on board” items.

The “at home” spending was reduced for us because we did not have: a) dining-out expenses, b) grocery shopping expenses, or c) gasoline and other automotive expenses. For us, over a 4 month period, these are about $10,000.

The “on board” expenses were lower than expected. We knew how much we had spent by pre-booking excursions through Princess. However, we cancelled about 60% of these bookings during the cruise, and booked our own at lower prices. The cancelled tours essentially covered all of our other on-board spending. There were charges for the self-booked excursions that showed up on our credit card, but these were much lower than the typical “at home” credit card activity.

These effects were substantial…totaling about the cost of a single booking in an inside cabin or ocean-view cabin for the cruise.

Net of all this is that the practical cost for a long cruise differs from the figure that you see in the cruise in booklet in several ways. You have to add to that figure the cost of air flights (if this is not folded into your booking costs), excursions, gratuities, and any on-board spending (specialty dining, drinks, gambling, boutique purchases, and photographs). But, subtract from this the spending that you would have otherwise have had at home.

One passenger said that the cost of their simple room on the ship was “quite close” to what they would have spent staying at home.