When my wife and I took a cruise on NCL’s Norwegian Dawn in 2008, there were coin-op washers and dryers on board. Actually, come to think of it, the machines may have been free to use, but the detergent was $1/box. At any rate, compared to everything else on the ship, it wasn’t pricey, and I’d imagine most cruise ships would have laundromats.
*Do you have your passports? *Unless you take a cruise from San Francisco or LA to Hawaii, pretty much any cruise will require you to have passports.
As for “lots to do” - the last cruise I was on had lots. The ship itself was practically a floating art museum and they had self-guided iPod tours. There was a small library to borrow books and movies from (the staterooms all had DVD players) and if you had the dough, Internet access was available. At night, there was dancing, and in the afternoon, there were dancing lessons.
We never felt at a loss for something to do, but we’re not tightly-wound Type A people who have to check their email/facebook/twitter/whatever every three minutes.
Seconding the message board over at cruisecritic.com. They can tell you everything you want to know and more about every cruise line. Once you have picked a cruise, you can stick to the part of the board that only deals with your cruise line. Seriously, the amount of information over there is staggering.
I’d also agree that Carnival is a good choice for a first time cruiser. There will be plenty to do. The food is decent and the prices are among the lowest in the industry. Some of their ships are starting to age but they’ve also got some new ones coming on line. I’d shoot for a newer one if possible.
Since you’re a midwesterner like me, your driving options are probably Galveston and New Orleans. Any port other than those and you’ll almost certainly need to fly. That adds quite a bit to the cost of the trip but is also more convenient than an 8 hour (or more) drive.
We sail out of Galveston on May 22. This will be our 3rd cruise with Carnival and we’re really looking forward to it.
Good luck, congratulations and have fun!
Although passports are strongly recommended, closed loop Caribbean cruises (ones that start and finish at the same port) do not require a passport. A certified copy of your birth certificate and a drivers license will suffice.
From here.
I’ve never heard of and can’t imagine a country looking for tourism dollars denying entry to a cruise visitor that didn’t have a passport but I suppose that they are within their rights to do so.
Good question. When we first started to cruise, there were washers and dryers, but they had vanished on the NCL ship we took 2 years ago. However five days in or so they had a special where you could send a whole bag of clothes to get washed for a fairly reasonable price. it is probably worth doing in any case, since there aren’t a lot of washers and there are often a lot of people who want to use them.
Airlines aren’t the only ones adding all sorts of charges. To get low cabin rates to attract people, a lot of the cruise lines have been adding charges for lots of other things. For instance, while alcohol has always cost money, most cruise lines charge for soda also.
I’ve done 12 cruises to date all over the world and it is my favorite way to travel. Booking the cruise, the website: vacationstogo.com specializes in discount cruising. I have done Princess, NCL, Holland America, and Celebrity to date. Among the ones I haven’t tried, Disney and Carnival generally rate on the lower end and Royal Caribbean tends to rate well. Celebrity is my favorite line for the price, but among the four I have been on, only Holland America has been ‘just average’. Generally, each cruise line has ships at different levels of quality just like hotel chains. The website I mentioned will provide all the information on the ships, quality, amenities, etc. Almost all of the ships I have been on have been four or five stars and all have had coin-op laundry services. You are taking a short enough trip, however, that you should be able to get by without doing laundry.
As someone else suggested, I would recommend NOT going on the honeymoon immediately after the wedding. You are exhausted, have a ton of gifts to sort through, and just have a lot of logistical issues that pop up, making it far easier to separate the events. Besides, having that flexibility will go a LONG ways towards saving money on the cruise. That is, pick a cruise that is underbooked going to the places you want to go around the time of year you want to go, and you can generally save 50-70%. Since you’re in the mid-West, it sounds like it’s equally inconvenient to go anywhere there is an ocean. Alaska is a great ‘first cruise’ destination, but I think you need a week in most cases to do that properly. If you do Alaska, I recommend one that leaves from Seattle as opposed to Vancouver because the ‘international’ flight to go to Canada will cost a lot more. The Caribbean has the same issue as almost all the cruises leave from either Miama/Ft. Lauderdale, FL or Puerto Rico. A Florida based cruise will save you money on airfare, but will take a greater number of days to go anywhere interesting. Puerto Rico will generally cost more to get there, but you can probably get a shorter cruise. The only places I’d generally recommend avoiding are the Bahamas and Mexico, both of which are dumps. Canada from Montreal to Boston is also a pretty boring cruise I’d otherwise avoid.
I neither drink nor gamble, and as you might guess based on the number of cruises I’ve been on, I don’t get bored on them and really enjoy myself. The food is always amazing and if you don’t like the fixed dining, you can always do a line that doesn’t have that (NCL), or one that does, and just skip certain nights and hit the buffet instead. As others have said, Cruisecritic.com is a great site, particularly for checking out a specific ship or port of call. For island countries or Alaska, the cities themselves are small and generally you can see everything there is in a few hours. You will only feel shortchanged on a Mediterranean, European, Scandinavian, or Asian cruise, but it doesn’t sound you are otherwise planning one of those. About the only thing I might advise is check out the ports on Cruisecritic in advance in terms of available tours. Your biggest expense will be the shore excursions, and the ships will all push their excursions very heavily, usually based on fear. The fear, in this case, is that an unlicensed tour provider will rip you off/endanger you, and/or make you miss the ship. In reality, I have never seen that happen, and I have gotten burned numerous times selecting a ship based tour that goes to various sites, only to hit shore and find out ALL the local tours go there too, and they are half the price. Alaska cruises are especially notorious for this crap.
And just to add another point, Voyager is absolutely right about this. The cruiselines will offer to sell you a soda card, wine card, or cocktail card on the first day. Some (like Princess) will let you bring one bottle of booze per person when you board, but will hold any other alcohol purchases until the end of the cruise. You can otherwise bring your own sodas onboard to save money with no restrictions on any of the cruiselines I’ve been on. You can also bring alcohol on board too if it is ‘re-packaged’. That is, if your large Aquafina bottle has some other liquid in it, I have never seen anyone get questioned about it.
Definitely go! We went on a cruise for our honeymoon as well, 10 days through the Panama Canal. We got to see Aruba, Jamaica, Costa Rica, Panama, and Colombia, cruise through the canal, go zip-lining and walking through some beautiful old cities, played on the beach, met some cool people on board, and had an amazing time. It is what you make of it though. If you want to go do a bunch of stuff, schedule port excursions at every port and have an adventure! If you want to relax on the boat, then you can do that too! Even days at sea can be pretty fun, there’s spas, movies under the stars, various games and competitions, sports, entertainment, and of course plenty of people to meet up with and get to know. We wanted to plan our next cruise as soon as we stepped foot off the boat!
So I think you should go, have fun, and see as much as you can possibly see, and have a great time!
ETA: Different lines have a lot of variation depending on the boat. You should probably get a good idea of what region you want to travel to (Alaska, Caribbean, Mexico, South/Central America) and then look at each line that offers trips there to get an idea of what amenities they offer. Some lines are more geared towards families and kids, others have a more senior crowd. I think Princess is usually an older crowd, but I have heard that Celebrity and RC are a little more party-oriented.
While I agree that cruise.critic is a good thing to check, you need to take the comments in context. There seem to be a lot of posts from people doing their eightieth trip who know just the guide who will take you to the pyramid no one else knows about. On the other hand, it was great in giving hints about ports where you can get public transportation to the sights for a tenth the cost of the cruise lines arranged transportation and a lot more freedom.
You can also check for consensus. There is a European owned cheapo cruise line that goes around the Mediterranean we were thinking of. The comments were universally negative about it, so we chose NCL, which worked out nicely. Subsequently we heard stuff confirming that this company is one to stay away from.
Like hotel review sites, you’ll always get some people griping about their own problems, but they can be useful.
I did this exact cruise in January, although it was perhaps the anti-honeymoon: I went with my father-in-law, sister-in-law and grandmother-in-law, and no, my wife didn’t come. 
This was definitely an older crowd. My sister-in-law and I were not technically the youngest people on board, but we were heavily outnumbered by the over sixty crowd. This didn’t bother me, given who I was with anyway, but it may be an issue for you if you want to socialize more. This was Princess, who I think steer older anyway, although the much younger crew mentioned it seems cyclical: the previous trip had been much younger. I bet school calendars, etc play a part in that!
I did have a lot of fun, although a big part of that was being part of a larger group that I get along with very well. However, I’d be careful about what your wife means by “lots to do”. If she is like me she is the sort of person who likes to get up at 6:30am and rush out of the hotel to “maximize” the vacation by seeing as much stuff as possible, and a cruise might not be a natural fit, especially if there are a lot of “at-sea” days. There is certainly enough to do on the boat, but it is often more low key stuff like lounging at the pool or games of scrabble in the library.
I’ve only been on one cruise (on Disney Cruise Line), but did a great deal of research before going. Disney generally gets very good reviews. From what I have read, it is not at all comparable to Carnival, but more like Royal Caribbean.
One of our table mates on our Disney cruise had previously cruised on Carnival, and told us that there was absolutely no comparison between the two cruise lines.
FWIW, Disney doesn’t have casinos on board their ships, but there are adult-exclusive restaurants and nightclubs–and alcohol, of course.
Voyager - is the sketchy European cruise line you are talking about ‘Costa’? I was curious about them myself because I see lots of mixed reviews, and they are cheap, but I don’t personally know anyone who has used them. I hear the same thing about some of the smaller cruise lines in Asia that can be kind of dicey.
Getting back on topic though, I think the location can be part of the crowd you get as well as the time of year. The Panama Canal cruise is a bit longer and so it isn’t as cheap as some of the generic Caribbean ones, ergo it tends to attach an older crowd with time on their hands and disposable income. I too, experienced a much older crowd when I did the Panama Canal with Princess. By comparison, I cruised on the Caribbean Princess in February (around the Caribbean) and that one was a mix of families, older folks, and honeymooners. I saw an equal number of older/younger people on the Alaska cruises with both Celebrity and Holland. Only Bermuda (with Celebrity) had an almost all younger crowd (and for some reason, that one cruise had a very large obviously gay passenger base as well, although I have no idea if that is normal or if there was a group booking). Either way, that one was one of the most enjoyable cruises my wife and I ever did.
We went on a Caribbean cruise on NCL about 15 years ago. The food was wonderful, the service was great, some of the excursions (like Chichen Itza) were great…but I’m not a big fan of sitting in the sun, and I don’t swim. Thus, a lot of the allure of that kind of cruise was lost on me (though my wife loved it).
I likely wouldn’t go on another Caribbean cruise, for that reason. OTOH, I’d definitely consider an Alaska cruise.
We’ve been on two cruises. One was Disney, about eight years ago, and one was to Mexico on Carnival last year.
I am not a gambler, so there was a lot more non-gambling stuff to do on Disney.
We didn’t have any trouble sneaking liquor on board either time.
FWIW.
Regards,
Shodan
Regarding alcohol, you can usually bring on 2 bottles of wine openly and they won’t hassle you about it. I found out that those big boxed wines will travel very well and hold something like 3-4 bottles each. When the goal is to drink cheap and not necessarily to drink well, it will do the job. Also seconding the “liquor in a water bottle” thing. You use your room card as your credit card which makes it feel like you aren’t spending money, but rest assured alcohol is about comparable to what you’d pay at a mid-level club or restaurant. I didn’t find it outrageously expensive but definitely not cheap.
Also, a friend of mine who worked on a cruise ship for 6 months told me that although the ships have a policy of confiscating alcohol brought aboard at port, you can politely decline to check the bottles in and they shouldn’t give you much grief about it. Just say you’d had a bad experience with misplaced items and didn’t want to chance it.
But unless you are Disney nuts, don’t cruise Disney for you honeymoon. Its very Disney.
(If you are Disney nuts, its probably the perfect honeymoon).
Celebrity or NCL. Both are well regarded, with diverse populations, a lot to do, large fleets with multiple itineraries. Neither will make you wonder if you accidentally boarded a floating retirement home or a floating frat house.
I did a search on Cruise Critic, and think Costa is the one. They don’t show up much on travel sites from here, I believe they get most of their passengers from Europe. (BTW, I looked at some itineraries, and Cairo seems to have vanished as a destination.
Getting back on topic though, I think the location can be part of the crowd you get as well as the time of year.
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We’ve never been on a cruise with a lot of really old people, but we also have never been on one in the northern Caribbean or Mexico, which seems to be the first cruise for a lot of people.
To the OP: A cruise might be good for you but I recommend consulting a travel agent that specializes in cruises if possible. I like cruise critic a lot but you are likely to get a response that of course cruising is for you. Try to find someone who is willing to tell you that a cruise is not for you.
If you decide to go with one of the discount agencies make sure you read the fine print on the offer. I had a friend who was about to book a cabin thinking they were going to get free gratuities but missed that it was only if you booked a suite.
Also keep in mind that time of year, destination, duration of cruise, and cruise line will influence the demographics of your fellow passengers. That said, if your fiancee wants lots to do I look at Norwegian, Carnival, or Royal Caribbean first. Generally speaking the shorter the cruise and sunnier the destination the younger the fellow passengers.
[I’ve read these boards for many years but just joined today. My first post…I’ll figure out how to quote properly in the near future.]
Dining - Lines that I know have the open style of dining are Norwegian, Royal Caribbean, Princess, Celebrity, and (I think) Carnival.
Retired folks - The lines have different demographics. If you want to minimize the presence of the elderly, go with NCL, Carnival, or RCL.
Closed Loop cruises- Keep in mind the getyouhome site is only about how to return to the US. You might still need a passport to enter the country you are visiting. I’m going to Alaska for the first time this summer and some of the optional tours have a note about needing a passport to temporarily enter Canada for a day trip.
Laundry - Princess has self service laundry. The lines I’ve been on didn’t have that so I would bring my backpacking clothes and a bottle of campsuds. Wash it in the sink and dry it in the shower.
Alcohol - varies per cruise line. Princess is a bottle of wine, Celebrity is two bottles, Holland I think might be a case. RCL is no alcohol allowed. If you go to cruise critic you will occasionally see people who were caught sneaking alcohol in and had to pay a visit to the “naughty room”.
I would love to know what would happen to someone found bootlegging some booze aboard the ship—It’s not illegal, so I don’t think that they could physically restrain you in the brig.
Are you kicked off the cruise?
Since they obviously only make additional $$$ (at least after the initial price of the cruise itself) by having passengers freely spend while on the boat, I can’t imagine that they would give someone the ol’ heave-ho, as they can’t overcharge a passenger for food and drink who has been booted off the boat…
I’ve read before that they scan the luggage as it’s loaded on board ship. If they find anything they detain the luggage, then security invites you down to wherever they’ve temporarily stored it.
As for what happens after that I do not have any first hand experience. I did have a cousin recently who’s luggage was detained due to an extension cord though. Nothing happened to her other than losing the cord.
I suppose they could kick you off the ship if they wanted to. Depends on the contract of carriage or whatever it’s called. There have definitely been people kicked off during a cruise for being drunk, unruly, etc.