HOW MUCH SHOULD YOU expect to pay

HOW MUCH SHOULD YOU expect to pay for your family cruise vacation? It’s a simple question, but the answer depends on various decisions you make. Will you cruise for three days or three months? Do you want the most spacious, top-level cabin with a private balcony? Do you want to stay aboard and enjoy the ship’s free amenities? Or will you add as many shore excursions as possible? Your answers to all of these questions-and more-will determine the price of your cruise.

How Cruises Are Priced
Cruise ships are priced to appeal to people with different levels of income. As with land-based vacation resorts, you will find some cruise ships that are dirt cheap while others have prices so high that they induce nose bleeds. The trick is to determine your budget and then find a ship whose base price is low enough to let you add on all the extras you will want to enjoy while you are aboard.

You’re not alone in booking this cruise-in fact, ships are filling up faster than they have in years. In 2004 alone, the estimated number of Americans who booked cruises was bigger than the entire population of New York City: 9 million, a solid 5 million more than a decade earlier. At any given time, you’re likely to encounter serious competition for the best cabins and the best deals, especially during peak

school-vacation weeks and holidays. You need to do your homework, do it well, and do it as early as possible so you can jump on every opportunity that comes along.

When looking at the costs, consider that the industry tends to use terminology ranging from lowest to highest, with the least expensive ships called value or mass-market, followed by premium and then luxury or deluxe. There are also niche and specialty companies whose itineraries might be, say, for two weeks aboard a small- capacity expedition ship from the southern tip of Chile to the wilds of Antarctica. This kind of cruise, as you might have already guessed, will cost you a heck of a lot more than three days aboard a value- priced ship in Florida and the Bahamas. Beyond these extremes, there are all kinds of cruises whose prices fall in between.

Some parent companies own a variety of cruise lines that fall into different price categories. Carnival Corporation, for instance, owns the premium Cunard and Holland America lines as well as the value-priced Carnival ships. Within the fleets of each individual line, you will usually find newer ships that cost more to cruise aboard than older ships.

While all the extras You choose, along with your cruise length and destination, will affect your specific vacation cost, you can get a good feel for the price ranges at various cruise lines by looking at a few sample itineraries from each. The examples you’ll see on the

CRUISE COSTS
promotions. Prices are, of course, subject to change (which usually means they go up).
Still, this general overview of the short, medium-length, and longer itineraries offered by each of the major cruise-ship companies will give you a place to start when considering the costs of the various cruise lines and which might be right for your budget and family needs.

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