Cruise Bargain Tip ~ Car Parking & Hotel

As most of you know, my next cruise is in August leaving from the Port of Mobile, Alabama. It was significantly less to leave from there, enough that made it worth the extra 2.5hrs drive to Mobile, over what it would take to get to Galveston!

So if you are a budget cruise traveler, such as myself, it pays for you to check other ports to get more competitive pricing! And booking as far in advance as you can guarantees that you will receive a great discount!

This particular cruise I have booked has gone up $600 since I booked it in Feb. That's a big difference.

But for this particular blog, I am going to share with you a tip that I discovered last year.

CRUISE & HOTEL PACKAGES.
This is not booked through the cruise line, but through hotels within the area of the port. My first experience with this was out of Port Canaveral. We stayed at a wonderful hotel RADISSON CAPE CANAVERAL that overlooked the port. When we walked outside that morning, we could see our ship docked! How exciting that is !!!

So how is this a great bargain, you might ask. Well, when you park at the terminal you are probably going to pay something like $15 per day parking (varies per terminal) but thats a good basic amount. You can research this by pulling up each specific terminal.

For Port Canaveral, I read about the hotel on a cruise forum, so I called, and for $15 more than I was paying to park directly at the ship terminal, I could stay in a really nice hotel the night before and they would drop me off at the terminal front. Well, that is a bargain if I ever have found one... we were going to spend the night at a hotel anyway the night before, so why not book the Cruise Package at the hotel and get a really nice place for just a few bucks more. And you might find that you are actually staying with more cruisers than you expected!

We took the shuttle to the ship that morning, and the guys that drove the shuttle loaded and unloaded our luggage for us, so we just grabbed our carry on bags and walked to the ship. Our bags met us later in the afternoon at our cabin door.

So this year, going out of Alabama, I began to research hotels in the area that offer this type of package. Since we are just taking a 5-day cruise the savings is not quite as significant as the one in Port Canaveral, but I ended up paying an extra $44 for a pre-cruise hotel at the Radisson Admiral Semmes right near the port. This hotel includes a breakfast certificate for $20 to use the morning of the cruise, and it has covered parking and the shuttle to the ship.

So when you get ready to cruise, if you live far enough that you want to drive in the night before I suggest you begin researching hotels near the port with Pre-Cruise packages. It's definitely worth it, and you don't have to deal with the pre-cruise traffic! Shuttles tend to be able to just breeze right by everyone else ;)

That's it for now...

Katrina