Can you just add someone else to a cruise cabin?
In:A cruise sounds like such a good vacation that you might be tempted to add friends or family to join you. One of the first ideas that comes to mind is calling your travel agent and putting someone else in your cabin. But does that really work?
It sounds easy. Just have the cruise line add the other people to your cabin in the same way they'd do if you booked a hotel room. Although this sounds simple, it's not only not practical, it can cause issues with maritime regulations.
This post will address the reality of changing how many people are in one cabin, and why you can't simply add someone else to a reservation.
If you want to add someone else to your room (or add more people, in general), here's what you need to know about how and why to do it.
Every cabin has a capacity for an important reason
Regardless of which stateroom you choose, there's a maximum capacity for that room specified by the cruise line.
While you can potentially have less people than that in the room, you cannot exceed it, no matter what.
When you look at a cabin on the deck plan, the specific room category lists how many people can be booked into that room.
Most cabins are double occupancy, which means up to two people can stay in the room. A few cabins are designed for solo travelers, but they're few and far between.
There are bigger cabins that can handle anywhere from 3 to 8 people, and they are sometimes referred to as "spacious staterooms" or are simply suites.
The reason why each cabin has a max capacity is for safety reasons.
Cruise lines take safety at sea extremely seriously, and that applies to cabins.
Every cabin correlates to spaces available in life craft that would be needed in the case of an emergency.
Any cruise ship needs to ensure there are more than enough spaces on life boats and life rafts for every single passenger and crew member. To achieve this, they never oversell a specific cabin so the math always works.
Safety even comes before sales
In some cases, Royal Caribbean may still not allow you to add an extra passenger to a stateroom, even if that room is designed to accommodate more people than you had originally booked.
Let's say you booked two people in a spacious balcony cabin that could accommodate up to four people, but later wanted to add a third or fourth passenger to that room.
While you understand you can't do that in other rooms, why not this one?
The request may be denied if the ship is booked with lots of other passengers maxing out their cabins.
Specific cabins use the specific muster stations. A given muster station is designed to use a specific set of lifeboats. For example muster station A1 might use lifeboats 3 and 4.
If there are already a number of cabins for muster station A1 that have more than double occupancy such as during peak summer month when more families with kids travel, then the lifeboat capacity may be reached.
In our example, someone with two people in a cabin in that muster station who wants to add another person. Despite the cabin being able to accommodate the next guest, the cruise line can't allow another guest or else the lifeboats would not be able to accommodate everyone in an emergency.
They aren't allowed to say, "In an emergency go find another lifeboat with spare room."
What you can do to get friends or family onboard instead
In short, the workaround to this issue is you need to book them a new reservation.
If your room is maxed out, it's usually simpler to book them their own cabin.
Upgrading your cabin to a larger room might work, but it depends if there's a larger cabin available left to book. Plus, you'd be booking at the prevailing rates instead of whatever price you originally paid.
Moreover, if you're past final payment date, there could be penalties to changing your room. In my experience, if you're willing to spend more money than you originally paid, Royal Caribbean doesn't usually assess penalties after final payment on the same sailing.
But the simplest approach could be to book a new cabin, assuming one is available.
If you have minors that you want to add, Royal Caribbean will allow you to book minors by themselves in a cabin if that room is adjacent, connecting, or across from their parents room.
Otherwise, you could swap adults around to have one in the new room, and move a kid back into the original room. Name changes are allowed without any penalty, even after final payment, as long as one person from the original reservation remains in the cabin.
