Those Who Cannot Take Last-Minute Cruises

Last-minute cruises, a perennial interest of ours and our readers, are an excellent option to consider if you are looking to take an affordable cruise vacation. There are other ways to find cheap cruises, but perhaps no method is more efficient than waiting to book at the last minute, when a cruise line has a strong financial incentive to book every open seat (should any exist). That said, last-minute cruises are only a live option for some people, as we recently discussed in an article about those who can take a last-minute cruise. Here we reverse the question, asking who can’t take a last-minute cruise, explicitly addressing what was before merely inferable.

We begin with a distinction: there are those who won’t take a last-minute cruise because of preference and those who can’t take them because of necessity. Last-minute cruises are by nature unpredictable and they could be virtually any length and to any destination, so if you have a precise cruise vacation in mind, and if you are unwilling to adjust that preference, last-minute cruises are essentially a non-option. It’s not as if you can say, “I want to take a week-long cruise to the Caribbean; I’ll just wait till the last-minute to book it.” Obviously, only cruise lines with seats to fill offer deals, and these are for all intents and purposes random. You could potentially fulfill a vague vacation plan – I want to go somewhere warm for no longer than a week, say – but that’s about all.

This group of people, however, at least can take a last-minute cruise if they so desire, and this means they are part of a relatively select group of people for whom last-minute cruises are a reasonable possibility. Booking a last-minute cruise requires an unusual amount of flexibility, ruling them out for anyone with a largely unalterable schedule or who have commitments that keep them more or less stationary (regionally speaking). Someone with a rigid work/school schedule, for instance, would have trouble taking a last-minute cruise, and the same is true of parents with younger children.

All of this may sound obvious, and it is, but it’s worth emphasizing because people tend to forget that the last-minute cruises that one could conceivably take are fairly rare. And even if you are able to take one because you have a loose schedule and are largely free of movement-restricting obligations, you might not be able to take one that accords with your cruising interests. Just the same, they are always worth looking into, and it’s easy to do, as our next article about how to book a last-minute cruise will show.