Transatlantic ocean liners once played an essential role in global travel, ferrying people from Europe to North America, or vice versa, only for transportation purposes. People needed to get from one continent to the other, and the only way to do this was via ship. While few ships currently serve such a pragmatic transport role, sailings across the Atlantic live on in the form of transatlantic cruises, of which Costco Travel offers several. However, Costco transatlantic cruises are difficult to find, so we’ve compiled a guide to explain what transatlantic cruises are available and how you can go about booking one through Costco Travel.
A good place to start looking for cruises across the Atlantic is the Costco Travel page dedicated to transatlantic cruises. On this page you’ll find the “Featured Deals,” and, as we have said in every article we have written about Costco cruises, these are worth checking out because you might find a cruise you want to take that also happens to be discounted. This is also a good place to start because it is the only page on the Costco Travel website that clearly displays transatlantic cruises. Most of the destinations that have “Featured Deals” pages can also be listed as a search criterion when using Costco’s search tool. So, for example, Alaska has a “Featured Deals” page, and you can also directly search for any and all cruises to Alaska using the search tool by listing your desired location as “Alaska.” This isn’t the case with transatlantic cruises because “transatlantic” isn’t a possible search criterion. (This problem isn’t unique to transatlantic cruises. There is also no way to directly search for cruises to Australia and New Zealand.)
What are you to do? You could, as we said, just use the “Featured Deals” page, but this gives you an incomplete picture of what is available. There are only six cruises listed on this page, and for the most part they are completely different from one another. A 21-day cruise from Lisbon to Miami with luxury line Regent Seven Seas that stops at eleven ports of call is hardly comparable to Cunard’s utilitarian seven-night cruise that goes directly from New York to Southampton with no stops in between. So, the “Featured Deal” page, while helpful, offers nothing like a systematic presentation of the transatlantic cruises available. Unfortunately, there really is no systematic presentation of Costco’s transatlantic cruises, however, as the only other way you can find them is to search for cruises to Europe and the Mediterranean and then pick them out of the search results. Given how many cruises involve Europe and the Mediterranean, this would be an incredibly tedious process but for the fact that you can filter your search results. For example, there are 418 cruises in June 2015 that are classified by Costco as cruises to Europe and the Mediterranean, but when you limit your results to cruises that depart from New York City, there are only six available. (New York definitely seems to be the most active port as far as transatlantic cruises are concerned, but they occasionally leave from other East-Coast cities as well. We found a couple of cruises from Boston, for instance, and we also found one from Port Canaveral.) This still requires you to do several separate searches, at least if you don’t know exactly when you want to take your cruise and from which city you want to sail, but it’s a lot better than wading through hundreds of results.
So, if you want to take one of Costco’s transatlantic cruises, the process could be simpler, but it’s at least manageable. The featured deals page is helpful and you might be able to find a cruise on this part of the website straight away. If not, you’ll have to do some searching, and unfortunately this searching can’t be directly for transatlantic cruises, but the ability to filter results should allow you to find what you are looking for relatively quickly.
