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.

**