World cruises, at least when understood expansively, are rare, and for obvious reasons. Planning a multiple-month voyage, fitting it into a cruise line’s larger schedule, and finding people who want to spend tens of thousands of dollars to take a cruise is a difficult and complex undertaking. There therefore aren’t many world cruises, and the small selection of Costco world cruises reflects this. But Costco world cruises there are, and below we have explained how you can find these cruises and book them via Costco Travel.
Unlike most of the other destinations to which Costco offers cruises, there is no “Featured Deals” page dedicated to world cruises. If there was, this would be a logical place to start your research, but since world cruises exist only as a “destination” when using the Costco Travel website search tool, you’ll be sifting through search results from the get-go.
When using the search tool, one of the first things you’ll notice is that you can’t take a world cruise at any given time. During several months of the year, no world cruises are offered, so you must depart within certain months. Perhaps because of the odd lengths of world cruises – a cruise that starts in Seattle in September can be 37, 53, or 78 nights long depending on your final destination – the months with no world cruises appear to be somewhat random. It is difficult to offer a 78-night cruise every month that starts in one location and ends in another. Thus, there is a five-month stretch from August through December 2015 when no world cruises are offered, for instance, but this same extended gap doesn’t happen every year. As we said, the distribution seems to be fairly random, with cruise lines offering world cruises only when it fits with their other itineraries.
As for what kind of world cruises you can actually book through Costco, the diversity is immense. An eleven-night cruise from Southampton to New York City (a classic transatlantic cruise) is classified as a world cruise by Costco, and so are multiple-month journeys that essentially cover the entire world. Costco world cruises also start and end in various locations around the globe, and all but the longest cruises tend to be one-way. (The shortest round-trip cruise we found starts and ends in Fort Lauderdale and lasts 68 days. All the others we found were over 100 days long.)
In general, the longer the cruise, the more ocean you cover, but this isn’t always the case. You can get from Los Angeles to Sydney in 22 days, and this technically stretches over more of the globe than many longer cruises. So, while there aren’t that many world cruises in any given year, there is still a great deal of variety. If you never end up taking a world cruise, it likely won’t be because there isn’t anything that suits your taste.
Of course, as you might expect, a world cruise isn’t cheap, even through Costco. Still, they can be a great value. For example, for a world cruise starting in Istanbul and ending in Rome, in April of 2015, for your fare of $2299, you get to see more than a dozen ports, including Istanbul, Bosphorus Strait, Constanta, Varna, Bosphorus Strait, Dardanelles Strait, Lesvos, Mykonos, Marmaris, Thira/Santorini, Athens/Piraeus, Athens/Piraeus, Katakolon, Delphi, Corfu, Taormina, Naples and Rome/Civitavecchia.
If you are interested in taking a world cruise with Costco Travel, we recommend reading our general overview and guide to Costco cruises. Having read that and the present article, you’ll know the basics of how Costco cruise works and will be ready to start exploring your options in an informed way directly with Costco.
