Best Disney cruise tips, tricks and secrets
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Since the Cruise Staff department is relatively small, it’s necessary for new crew members to jump right in and quickly learn the ropes. One of my first activities was helping to host the 50s dance party. Though I might have looked the part while doing the Twist in my poodle skirt, guests probably didn’t realize that I was battling one of the worst cases of seasickness that I had ever encountered. I have suffered from motion sickness my entire life, even getting sick on the mountainous roads of my hometown. I was so anxious to work onboard a cruise ship, though, that I didn’t want to admit that seasickness would be a problem for me. Prepare to tip even more if you are sailing at the concierge level.
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If you ever thought about working in the travel industry, here's your chance to start with a true dream job. Room service is one of the many perks of being on cruising with Disney. You can order anything you want, and it will be brought right to your stateroom door. Best of all, with the exception of a few packaged items and drinks, room service is complimentary. However, even though there is no charge for the food, it is customary to tip the person who brings it to your room. Yes, you can remove, reduce, or increase the automatic gratuities on a Disney cruise by visiting Guest Services during the cruise.
How Guests Impact Crew Member’s Lives
The ships cater to childless couples and friend groups with special spaces reserved just for grownups. Alcohol isn't free on board, but you can find discounted drinks at happy hour. On my most recent Disney cruise, select drinks were 50% off from 9 p.m. Check your Navigator app during your sailing to look for happy hours on your Disney cruise. Speaking of Facebook, the odds are excellent that your individual sailing has a Facebook group with several hundred people in it. If you wish to participate in gift exchanges, get to know your shipmates pre-cruise or tap into a hive mind for advice on picking excursions and packing, it's a big asset to belong to a group specific to your sailing.
Assistant Server
Our hours on the balcony were beautiful—by far the most tranquil part of our Disney cruise. Another impressive restaurant, called Animator’s Palate, is a tech-driven shrine to Disney’s drawn history. Screens all around the dining room bring to life how pencil sketches turned into movie gold. You’re assigned to draw a character on your placemat, then hand it to your server. Soon thereafter, your drawing, alongside those of your fellow diners, gets animated into a truly magical on-screen mashup. All meals are included in your Disney cruise fare, unless you choose to dine at Palo or Remy, adults-only restaurants where a dress code is enforced, reservations are a must, servers are experts, and food is a step up.
However, all of the cruise lines that docked in port had crew members who were all competing for the computer terminals at the Internet cafe. Just because you had the time and the money for a taxi to travel there, it didn’t necessarily mean you were going to be able to check your email. Just like cruise line guests are excited and eager to enjoy the deck parties, cocktail evenings and other occasions to have fun and celebrate, the crew members are anxious for events of their own. While it is fun to work a party as a crew member, you’re still expected to serve the guests and be professional. No one knew when Customs would start scanning the first crew member ID and allowing you to get off the ship. We also had staff meetings while we were docked in Port Canaveral, the only time that we really had the opportunity to run errands, get a haircut or go to Wal-Mart.
We actually had staff meetings at 2 a.m., the only time when one of us wasn’t working, so even if your work day ended at 10 p.m., you couldn’t really get much sleep because you had to be in a meeting at 2 a.m. The entire Cruise Staff team religiously walked around with an Excel document folded up in their back pocket because we never knew for certain where we were supposed to be at any given time in any day. When I was able to get off the ship, my only concern was finding a place to eat. To this day, I still consider a Subway sandwich that I bought in Nassau to be one of the top ten food highlights of my life. With the lack of food that I was willing to eat and the heavy amount of physical activity every day, I was soon losing weight at a rapid pace. By the end of my time with the DCL, I was stick thin and my clothes just hung on me.
You aren't locked into your assigned dining plans
If you're not picky about which cabin you get, an easy way to save a substantial amount of cash on your Disney cruise is to let Disney pick your cabin for you. You select a room type (such as an inside room or one with a balcony) and then let Disney assign you to a specific cabin location closer to sailing. For your flexibility, this type of guaranteed fare comes at a discount. When booking a Disney cruise, your best move is to book the cruise as soon as it becomes available. You'll have the best selection of cabins and generally the best prices.
You may give these envelopes directly to the serving team on the last night at dinner or at breakfast on your final morning. For your stateroom hostess, you may give the envelope to them in person or leave it in your room. Disney automatically charges your onboard account the standard tip amounts (unless you pre-pay). No tip amount is set in stone, so Disney allows you to adjust them before the cruise ends if you want to give more or wish to give less; just contact Guest Services onboard your Disney Cruise.
It’s a 760-foot water slide filled with show scenes, lighting, music and more that touches down into a lazy river. One-way positioning cruises — that is, those that end in a different location from where they started — are often much cheaper per night than standard round-trip cruises. The high season will cost more, especially during holidays and the summer break.
Disney cruise kids clubs: What to know about the Oceaneer Club - The Points Guy
Disney cruise kids clubs: What to know about the Oceaneer Club.
Posted: Fri, 15 Dec 2023 08:00:00 GMT [source]
If you can manage your own bags, don't put them out the night before and take them off the ship yourself the final morning. Remy and Enchante are super-fancy and pricy, but Palo is approachable-fancy and costs an additional $45 per person for the set menu. However, if you see the show first and then eat dinner, the servers are great about expressing your meal with little kids. It's better to do a quick dinner and then head to bed (or back to the kids club!) than an early dinner and miss the evening shows because your kid no longer has the ability to sit still.
Crew members’ schedules are highly erratic and rarely are you given an eight-hour time span in which to work, like most jobs on dry land. You might be scheduled for work for an hour, with an hour break, and then work again for a couple of hours with 30 minutes off. It was a serious medical problem that guests would find hard to believe with the extravagance of food in the guest areas, yet the lack of food for the crew was a problem nonetheless. This might sound like a blessing in disguise, since American diets are traditionally too heavy with too many calories. Yet, when you’re working for 18 hours a day on your feet doing very physical activities, you need some substance to get you through the day and we were definitely NOT getting it. On embarkation days, the Cruise Staff manned the shore excursions desk, booking shore excursions and answering questions about what was available at our ports of call.
When choosing your Disney voyage, though, the port stops will likely be your main variables. There are also stylistic differences from cruise ship to cruise ship—the Disney Fantasy, for example, incorporates Art Nouveau details throughout, while the Disney Dream is more Art Deco. Before our cruise, I’d scrolled blogs upon blogs devoted to Disney Cruise tips and hacks. But I found that most of these sites assume that their readers are repeat Disney cruisers looking to refine their travel skills.
If your family is considering getting a suite to spread out and have more space, but are finding the prices for Disney Cruise Line suites to be prohibitively high, consider connecting staterooms instead. A family of four can expect to spend about 50% more on connecting cabins instead of all staying in one room, which is likely a lot less than buying up to a suite which can be several times the cost of a regular room. For example, Disney Dream will sail a three-night cruise to move it from San Juan to Ft. You can book a cabin with a balcony for $1,580 for two people, which is a solid price on Disney Dream. The $3,326 price tag for a concierge-level cabin is very good; those cabins usually start at close to $800 to $1,000 higher on many other three-night sailings.
After days of land-based training, my training team was brought by van to the Disney Cruise Line’s crew area. Enjoy this behind the scenes look of what it’s really like working on a cruise ship and discover whether life on the open seas is really as exciting as it seems. They plan to build a new theme park there as well as make it a stop for their cruise ships. The crew member, Tirso Neri, who was working aboard the Disney Dream, was found by law enforcement to have sexually explicated photos and videos of minors on two different phones in his possession. According to reports from USA Today, an affidavit signed by a Homeland Security Investigations Special Agent stated that the photos and videos included both children and teenagers. If you love the idea of spa-like quiet and relaxation without paying around $200+ per treatment, look into the Rainforest Room in the Senses Spa, which costs much less than that per day.
It can be disorienting at first to find your way around a cruise ship, but Disney makes it easy to know if you are heading forward or aft when you're in the long cabin hallways. If the carpet design is upside down, you're heading toward the back of the ship, but if it is right side up, you're heading to the front of the ship. If you find the motion of the ocean to be a bit more than you bargained for, head to guest services, and they will give you — and your kids — motion sickness pills free of charge. If you order a can of Coke in the dining room or from room service, it's going to cost you a few dollars, but you can get as much free soda as you want from the fountain. These are usually located on the pool deck and in the buffet area. Bring a refillable bottle so you can easily take your soda with you around the ship.
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