For a number of years when the kids were young, we never made plans to take a spring break vacation. It’s generally too cold to really enjoy the beaches near us. We knew that Walt Disney World tends to be very crowded during spring break week, so that was out as an option as well. We usually just stayed home and tried to balance who was going to take time off from work to do local activities with the kids.
Two years ago, we got interested in taking a Disney Cruise Line trip to Alaska. Once we started planning the trip, we started to get really excited about going on a Disney cruise. While poking around the Disney Cruise Line website, we noticed that there was a cruise during our Spring Break week. It was a 5 day sailing on the Wonder out of Miami. It wasn’t that expensive considering the time of year and number of days on board. We decided to book it before we even took our Alaska trip, hoping we would enjoy the cruise. We had the best time during the Alaska cruise, as well as the spring break trip. Taking a Disney cruise became our staple spring break plan.
We’ve booked the same cruise for a few years and the prices have been fairly stable. They hovered around $3600 for the four of us. We’ve had to drop from a Verandah to an Ocean View room to keep the price within our budget, but that doesn’t bother us. We don’t spend much time in the room if we don’t have to given all the activities to do around the ship. We’ve stayed in the same room on multiple spring break trips and were planning on doing so again for 2017.
Disney Cruise Line recently announced the Spring 2017 itineraries. After reviewing them, we noticed that our usual trip wasn’t on the listings. Disney had shuffled the ships around, so we had a choice of two 7 day sailings, one 4 day sailing, and a 3 day sailing that fit within our Spring Break window. I was worried about prices given that Disney has really been raising rates on a lot of the popular sailing times (Christmas, Summer, and Easter/Spring Break). Since we are Gold Castaway Club members now, we were going to be able to book a day earlier than the general public.
We sent off two requests to our travel agent, one for a 4 day sailing on the Wonder and one for a 7 day sailing on the Magic. We thought perhaps that the 7 day sailing would be outside our budget, but maybe we could do an inside stateroom in order to make it affordable. We planned to book the 4 day no matter what, because we figured it would be inside our budget. After all, it was one day shorter than our normal 5 day trip and the itinerary wasn’t that exciting (one sea day, one Castaway Cay day, and one Nassau day).
When the quotes came back from the travel agent, we were stunned. The 7 day sailing was going to cost over $7,200 for an ocean view room. We figured it might be too much, but the quote was way outside the realm of possible. The 4 day sailing was even more shocking with a quoted price of over $4,300 for an ocean view room. This represents a huge jump in the per day price of the room over prior years: our costs were about $680 per day for prior cruises, versus about $1,000-$1,100 per day as quoted for the Spring 2017 itineraries. We had seen similar price increases when looking into a prime summer Alaska itinerary. At this point, we realized that Disney Cruise Line prices during prime season are not for us.
Reviewing this new information caused us to reevaluate our vacation plans. We still wanted to take a cruise, but Spring Break wasn’t going to work unless we wanted to try a different cruise line. After some family discussion and some brainstorming, we had a new idea. Since January 2017 will bring a new president to Washington, D.C., we are anticipating Inauguration Day as a school holiday in our area. When combined with the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday and a planned teacher workday, we have some time to work with. The kids will probably miss two days of school, but we are OK with this. I realize that missing some school days won’t work for everyone, but it has generally worked for our family.
Looking around the Disney Cruise Line website, we found 4 cruises that were possibilities; two 7 day sailings, one 5 day sailing, and one 4 day sailing. We priced these trips out on the website, looking at both verandah and ocean view rooms. These prices take into account the 10% onboard booking discount since the January sailings aren’t blacked out like the Spring Break cruises. Here is how the approximate pricing broke out (approximate since the web site won’t show me the price with the 10% discount):
| Ship | Cost | Per Day | Days | Room Type |
| Fantasy | 4,297.00 | 613.86 | 7 | Verandah |
| Magic | 3,441.00 | 688.20 | 5 | Verandah |
| Wonder | 4,866.00 | 695.14 | 7 | Verandah |
| Dream | 2,609.00 | 652.25 | 4 | Verandah |
| Fantasy | 4,031.00 | 575.86 | 7 | OceanView |
| Magic | 2,889.00 | 577.80 | 5 | OceanView |
| Wonder | 4,055.00 | 579.29 | 7 | OceanView |
| Dream | 2,506.00 | 626.50 | 4 | OceanView |
The most surprising prices were for the Fantasy sailing. The date was perfect for us, requiring the kids to only miss two days from school. We could fly in to Orlando the night before, stay at the Hyatt Regency at the Orlando Airport, and take the Disney transfer to the port the next morning. We did a similar sailing on the Fantasy in the summer and had a great time.
So, through a little bit of calendar searching, we were able to upgrade from a 4 day sailing in an Ocean View stateroom to a 7 day sailing in a verandah stateroom for less money. With a little bit of creative scheduling, you might be able to do the same.
If you have enjoyed this article, please be sure to check out our Disney Cruise Line information page, which has useful hints in addition to our cruise trip reports!
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