Top Family Cruises

Top Family Cruises
It’s impossible for anyone but you to decide which cruise ship makes the most sense for your personal vacation. Your budget, your family members’ personalities, and your ideas about ideal ports of call are going to be key factors in any cruise vacation you book.

Having said that, a few cruise companies are doing their darnedest to get your family vacation business, and they consistently rank highest in multiple surveys done by several sources throughout the industry. The reasons they tend to score highest include affordable pricing, good kids’ activities and clubs, good onboard facilities and areas for children, and good adult amenities within the context of the family environment.

These cruise lines are not typically known for setting the uppermost standards of excellence in terms of luxury and refinement, but they are usually favored when it comes to getting the best family-vacation value for your dollar.
The companies, in alphabetical order, are as follows:
Carnival Cruise Lines
Disney Cruise Line
Royal Caribbean

Holland America Line (HAL) is in the process of trying to push itself more consistently onto this list, and the cruise line is expected to continue adding family-friendly features to its ships in upcoming months and years- especially for children in the three- to five-year- old age range. You would be wise to include HAL in your search for a family-friendly cruise, as long as you pay attention to the particular programs and facilities offered by any specific ship that you choose within the company’s fleet. Also keep in mind that you may be among far fewer families than you would be aboard other cruise lines.

Celebrity Cruises, Crystal Cruises, Princess Cruises, Norwegian Cruise Lines (NCL), and Radisson Seven Seas Cruises also sometimes get high marks for family-friendly cruising. Still, they can cost more, and their facilities and services for children can differ from ship to ship within their fleets and from itinerary to itinerary. You very well might be able to find an excellent family cruise with Celebrity, Crystal, Princess, NCL, or Radisson Seven Seas. Each does have a children’s program, but you will need to do a tad bit more sleuthing on the particulars of your chosen dates, your destination, and the most suitable ship within each fleet. This little bit of extra research on your part could pay off with big dividends, though, in terms of your vacation enjoyment.

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Choosing The Right Ship

SOMETIMES, you will use your ship as nothing more than a home base from which to explore ports of call. In other cases, your ship will be a destination unto itself-bigger and more packed with activities than some of the towns where it will dock. And in both cases, whether you want to be aboard a mammoth vessel or within a cozier setting, you can have either top-shelf luxury or more affordable amenities. There are big ships and small ships, luxurious ships and value brands, in multiple combinations.

Ship Tours
Even if you have never before set foot aboard a boat of any kind, you can get a feel for how different ships are designed by comparing deck plans within your cruise ship brochures. Cruise companies generally create one of two kinds of deck plans to show you their ship designs: a lines plan, which shows each slice of a ship as a separate deck, or a full-scale illustration, which gives you a kind of X-ray vision peek through the side of a ship. In both cases, you can find a lot of valuable information on the page that will help you choose the right ship for your vacation.

In a traditional lines plan you will see each deck separately, from a bird’s-eye view. These kinds of deck plans are the best for choosing a cabin aboard, for two reasons. First, the cruise ship companies usually color-code each block of cabins by price range, which means you can find out whether that “great value” cabin you found is really in a so-so spot-say, right beneath the teen disco on the deck above it. Second, with these kinds of deck plans, you often can see the exact number of each cabin within the color-coded price-range blocks. This lets you request a particular cabin in the specific part of the ship where you want to be-for instance, closest to the elevators or the self-service washing machines.

There are a few things you should try to determine no matter which kind of deck plan you have. Depending on how much time you intend to spend in certain areas aboard, the following information will be useful in selecting an appropriate ship and cabins for your family’s particular needs:

• Where you want your cabin to be in relation to your children’s cabin
• Where you want an elderly grandparent’s cabin to be in relation to facilities such as elevators, dining areas, and card rooms.
• Where you want your family’s cabins to be in relation to noisier parts of the ship, such as the main atrium or dance clubs
• Whether you want your balcony to sit right beneath or directly downwind of the ship’s main smokestack
• When you look at a ship’s deck plans and begin to consider how you actually want to spend your time aboard, you may decide it would be worth it to pay a bit more and get exactly the cabin you want instead of settling for the least expensive one you can get. In many cases, even the cabins that are within the same lower price ranges offer different levels of privacy simply because of their location in a corridor.

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