The little trick to halve your cruise costs is really quite simple and to show you how I want to tell you the story of our client Anita. Every other spring, Anita calls me and tells me she’s ready to cruise Alaska the following summer. Since each new deployment season is announced in the previous 14 months or so, she's right on time to take advantage of the 1. best prices, 2. early enough to get the best stateroom in her category and 3. get the best add-on offers to entice early bookers. Let's see how she saves so much:
1. Book Early to get Best Prices: Cruise lines always announce the new deployment season with prices at what I call their MSRP (manufacturer's suggested retail price); this is the recommended retail price of a product at which the retailer sells the product - but it's just a number, ignore it! On the day the booking season opens, the cruise lines suddenly DROP the price to get their most loyal cruise customers to book early and there's a mad rush to book. This is where you need to beware, dynamic pricing is going to be used shortly after day 1 and I'll explain further down below.
2. Book Early to get the Best Stateroom: By booking early, you get the best rooms in the location you want. Plus, each type of stateroom (Interior, Oceanview, Balcony) has 3-4 categories each which differ by a few hundred dollars. As an example: A Celebrity Cruises Balcony in category 2B is located near the front of the ship whereas Balcony category 1A is in the more coveted mid-ship area. So by booking early, book a room where one category ends and the better category begins! Wouldn't it makes sense to grab the cheaper room by booking early next to the more expensive category?!!
3. Book Early to get the Best Add-On Offers: When the new booking season starts, the cruise lines WANT you to book early so they give you extra add-ons to sweeten the deal - and boy is their offer generous. Our friends at Princess Cruises always come out with a great offer early, FREE room upgrades within your stateroom type (i.e. upgrade from front of ship to mid-ship), FREE pre-paid gratuities for two guests and a FREE evening dining in a specialty restaurant. This can EASILY be worth $600 per person! But this offer comes once each season and only last roughly 6 weeks.
There’s one more SECRET TRICK. But first, I want to dispel the BIGGEST CRUISE MYTH - this might have worked in 2008 but this is gone out the window.
The BIGGEST CRUISE MYTH is that you can still get a LAST MINUTE DISCOUNT! They're gone, zap, nada, boom - they don’t exist anymore. Don't be fooled by the Facebook banner ads telling you to click for last minute deals! Here's why: when the 2008 financial collapse occurred all of the travel operators struggled - the cruise lines, the beach resorts, the escorted tour companies. To get you to book, they had to PLEAD, they had to BEG, they had to practically give away the stateroom for free in the hopes that you would buy endless amounts of booze to help make up the loss! Jump ahead a few years and the economy is strong and the last minute discounts no longer exist. Want proof? Richard Fain, the Chairman of Royal Caribbean Int'l, told the industry last year that the result of those last minute deals never improved their bottom line, guests weren’t buying onboard anyways and they ended up losing more money. To make matters worst, the cheap prices lowered the quality of the cruise experience.
Now that we’ve had economic stability and cruising is in the golden years (i.e new ships and plenty of them), the cruise lines are employing dynamic pricing so that 5-7 months out, they lower the price to sell rooms and at the 60 days to cruise date arrives, they increase the price and snag the last minute shopper who has no choice but to pay the piper or stay home. I’m not kidding, the pricing can be staggering for an Oceanview room in the front of the ship when booked 3 weeks to the sail date!
This leads me to my SECRET TRICK that no other cruise agency can offer yet it's so simple. I can't take any of the credit. Here's how it works: once you’ve booked your cruise with me, I have an automated tool called the ValueTracker that checks your pricing with the cruise line every morning. If it sees that the cruise line lowered the price, I get an email with your booking number indicating the price change and I get to call you and look like a hero with the amount you saved! Remember earlier I said that the cruise lines are using dynamic pricing and lower the prices 5-7 months out? If you book directly with the cruise lines they WILL NOT CALL YOU to inform of the price drop. I know this for a fact, personally - before I bought my travel agency - on my own booking, I would check the price weekly and when it dropped, I called them and they told me it was up to ME to CALL THEM to get the price adjusted! That's sad.
Of all the other tips, our automated ValueTracker tool will save you at least a couple of hundred dollars when you book with us.
So there you have it, book your cruise EARLY, to get the BEST staterooms, to get the best ADD-ON promotions and use my ValueTracker to alert you to price drops. Employ these tips and you will halve the price of your cruise vacation. And who wouldn't want more money to spend on the helicopter tour of the glaciers in Alaska?!
Call us today and let's book your groups next cruise or land vacation. If you live in the Silicon Valley, let's meet for coffee and plan out your next trip.
Jerry
