If you’re new to cruising, you may be wondering how to go about booking a cruise. Is it hard to book a cruise? What should you expect the cruise-booking process to be like? Fortunately, booking a cruise is very easy and doesn’t require much time.
There are two main ways to book a cruise – one involves a telephone call, the other involves filling out a form online. Let’s start with the second option.
Booking a cruise online is a lot like booking an airplane flight. You begin the process by selecting the criteria of your cruise. You’ll enter how many people will be going on the cruise, the location you want to sail to, the desired length of the trip, and so on. After this, you have to enter increasingly specific information, down to which room you want to stay in (at least with the major cruise lines, such as Carnival Cruises, which, by the way, has a pretty smooth booking system on their website). Basically, you enter all the information you might expect to enter into an online form, just as you would to book a flight (or, for that matter, just as you would to order any number of things online). The only trick is finding the best deals.
Booking a cruise is also like booking a flight in that there are two main types of websites that allow you to schedule a cruise. There are websites that are run by the actual cruise lines, like the Carnival website mentioned above, and there are websites that exist just for the sake of booking, like cruisedirect.com. Both sites operate the same way, though, requiring you to search for a cruise and then enter your personal information.
In this day and age, it’s hard to imagine a cruise line not having an online booking portal. It’s extremely easy to book a cruise online, so unless you have a compelling reason to avoid this method of booking, you should schedule and pay for your cruise online.
If you don’t want to book your cruise online, the major cruise lines, as well as sites like cruisedirect.com, have toll-free numbers you can call. The primary purpose of these numbers is to provide assistance to potential cruisers who are attempting to book a cruise, but at least some of them allow you to do the full booking process over the phone.
At the end of the day, it’s easiest to book your cruise online. There are an abundance of quality sites that allow you do this, and it’s the quickest and easiest way.