So, you’ve booked your Disney Cruise — now it’s approaching your check in day and you wonder what will happen?  The most important thing you need to know before booking your excursions, adult dining, character meets, and other activities is that you must be paid in full on your cruise.  Once you have paid in full for your cruise, you can book your activities.  The date for this depends on how many Disney Cruises you have taken.  If this is your first cruise, your check in day will be 75 days from your sailing date.  If you have taken 1-4 cruises (this makes you a Silver Castaway Club member), your date will be 90 days out.  If you have taken 5-9 cruises (this makes you a Gold Castaway Club member), your date will be 105 days out.  If you have taken 10 or more (a Platinum Castaway Club member), your date will be 120 days out.  On the other hand, if you are sailing in a Concierge stateroom, you can book 125 days out regardless of your prior number of cruises.  You should be contacted by the shore side Concierge team who will book your activities for you (I believe you can email them 125 days out, so you should get everything you want).

Let’s walk through booking an excursion on Castaway Cay, Disney Cruise Line’s private island in the Bahamas!  In this article, we will assume you have already checked in.  If you haven’t checked in, please read over our article on checking in for your Disney Cruise.

You will want to go to the Disney Cruise Line website at https://disneycruise.disney.go.com/. 

Once you are there, look in the upper right hand side and select My Cruise Activities. 

At this point, if you haven’t logged in, you will be prompted to log in with your Disney Cruise Line log in information.

Once you have logged in, you should see a listing of all of the cruises you have booked, but haven’t taken yet.  In this case, we’ve got a few cruises lined up over the next two years.  We are just going to deal with the first cruise.

If you notice on the first cruise, there is a Book Now area highlighted next to Activities.  You will want to click on that link.

Once you have selected Book Now, you will be brought to a web page similar to the below, which is the booking mechanism for the first day of your cruise.  All of the activities have a similar process for booking them, so we are just going to book an excursion for Castaway Cay.

You can change the activity day by selecting the calendar icon next to the date and selecting the date you want.  In this case, we are going to move to our Castaway Cay day.  As you can see, we have already selected Parasailing for the day, which is a great activity.  We’ve done this activity before and highly recommend it.

 In order to book a new excursion, select Book a Port Adventure from the bottom of the web page under “Book activities for <Date>”. 

This will take you to a web page where you can see all the available Port Adventures for your stop.  In this case, we are looking at the Port Adventures for our stop at Castaway Cay.  (Yes, I already checked for the Castaway Cay Cabanas but they were all taken). 

In this case, we are going to book a Walk and Kayak Nature Adventure, as a test case.  (We will release it later).  Press the “Select” button next to the adventure you want to book.

Once you select the port adventure you want, you will get a pop up that shows you the duration and price of the adventure, plus allows you to select the people going on it. (I’ve blanked out the names in this case).

In this case, we are only going to send the adults on this adventure so the kids can enjoy their new found friends in the Vibe and the Edge.  Once you select individuals, you can then select “Check Availability”.  After doing so, another selector will show up that allows you to pick the time of the excursion.  Simply select the time and hit “Save”.

 

The excursion will then be added to your list of scheduled activities for the cruise!  The process is the same for Port Adventures, adult dining (including Mixology Classes), spa services, and character meet and greets.

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!

* Please follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Email!