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How early do you book?


spursfreak21

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Hey all. I’m going to be on Enchantment this summer and plan on booking my next cruise on board. I’ve only cruised from Galveston and since that’s driving distance from where I live it’s easy to plan. If I’m looking to book for summer of 2021 what’s a good strategy considering most airlines don’t have their schedules released by then. Do you just book the cruise and hope you can find an reasonable accompanying flight later? 

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11 minutes ago, spursfreak21 said:

Hey all. I’m going to be on Enchantment this summer and plan on booking my next cruise on board. I’ve only cruised from Galveston and since that’s driving distance from where I live it’s easy to plan. If I’m looking to book for summer of 2021 what’s a good strategy considering most airlines don’t have their schedules released by then. Do you just book the cruise and hope you can find an reasonable accompanying flight later? 

Exactly.  We start checking prices after the schedules come out, but there was a study done that supports the strategy proposed by @brianmorris .    I don't wait for the lowest price, I just wait for a reasonable price.  We recently booked a 2022 cruise and won't be looking at airlines for at least another year.

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12 minutes ago, spursfreak21 said:

Hey all. I’m going to be on Enchantment this summer and plan on booking my next cruise on board. I’ve only cruised from Galveston and since that’s driving distance from where I live it’s easy to plan. If I’m looking to book for summer of 2021 what’s a good strategy considering most airlines don’t have their schedules released by then. Do you just book the cruise and hope you can find an reasonable accompanying flight later? 

I book the cruise ASAP, then I mock book flights using comparable months (travel seasons), if possible. For Southwest, I book ASAP. For nonsouthwest, I watch and wait (unless it is a long flight and I care about our seat choices). I also use the Hopper app, which tracks flight costs. Useful app.

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37 minutes ago, spursfreak21 said:

Hey all. I’m going to be on Enchantment this summer and plan on booking my next cruise on board. I’ve only cruised from Galveston and since that’s driving distance from where I live it’s easy to plan. If I’m looking to book for summer of 2021 what’s a good strategy considering most airlines don’t have their schedules released by then. Do you just book the cruise and hope you can find an reasonable accompanying flight later? 

If airfare is going to be a deal breaker for you, be sure you book a refundable cruise fare so that you can change your plans if airfare is outside of your budget.

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I find that by booking early the whole thing works itself out. Historically you will see a trend on ticket prices. I live in Chicago and I know I can fly to Fort Lauderdale and Orlando any time, at a decent price. So I start my search looking for cruises that leave from there. However, if I was to spot an insane deal from Seattle, the East coast or Europe, then I would be using Kayak and Google flights sporadically to get a read on the ticket prices. I do this with all my travel and not just cruises, I find the flights to be the easiest part....but I live by O'hare a very busy airport

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I book anywhere between a year and a half to a year out, basically as early as possible (if there is a sale going on). As for flights, I'm very fortunate that most of the ports are within driving distance for me, but the one time I flew to Miami I booked my flight I believe four or five months out, just to give us some extra time to plan everything out.

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1 hour ago, spursfreak21 said:

Hey all. I’m going to be on Enchantment this summer and plan on booking my next cruise on board. I’ve only cruised from Galveston and since that’s driving distance from where I live it’s easy to plan. If I’m looking to book for summer of 2021 what’s a good strategy considering most airlines don’t have their schedules released by then. Do you just book the cruise and hope you can find an reasonable accompanying flight later? 

I booked our Oct 2020 Greek cruise in April 2019. I was willing to pay the going rate, because I got the cabin category, JS and cabin location, Deck 8 aft corner, I wanted. That being said, my TA has already repriced the cruise twice, saving us $1400.

I have watched the flights pretty regularly once they were released at 330 days out. Being that they are overseas flights, I'm not sure how much of a difference that makes, but pulled the trigger about 3 weeks ago, when I saw what I though was a great price, compared to what I had seen in the past. As of today, those exact tickets have more than doubled in price. Will they drop below what I paid? Not sure. That's out of my hands now.

The combination of savings between the cruise repricing and airfare savings afforded us an extra night in Venice pre-cruise and left some money our pockets for spending money. Sounds like a good deal to me.

Happy Cruising!

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This is taking it a slight step further...in instances where I am cruising from a port that is out of the country, I subscribe to services like Faredrop or Scott's Cheap flights in order to get notified of low fares and error fares for the regions I am interested in when they occur. Skyscanner also has some good options to consider. The drawback is that the flight itineraries can tend to be longer, but the savings I have seen is incredible in some instances. You have to have patience to wait for what may work.

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9 minutes ago, DunkelBierJay said:

This is taking it a slight step further...in instances where I am cruising from a port that is out of the country, I subscribe to services like Faredrop or Scott's Cheap flights in order to get notified of low fares and error fares for the regions I am interested in when they occur. Skyscanner also has some good options to consider. The drawback is that the flight itineraries can tend to be longer, but the savings I have seen is incredible in some instances. You have to have patience to wait for what may work.

I did sign up for price alerts on Skyscanner. I found that they didn't always notify me in a timely manner, maybe once a week when prices were changing almost daily. I did use them to track flights on my own. I got R/T to Venice from ORD, premium economy, non-stop there with a 1hr40min layover on the way back with British Airways for cheaper than economy is going for now with the exact same flights, about three weeks later. Lucky? Maybe? Probably wouldn't have caught the deal if I wasn't such a cyber stalker!

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We started cruising during our kids' March break and last week of the summer, so we know the dates.  Thus, we book as soon as the dates are released and then watch for price drops from there.  Since we are booking so far out, we book refundable.  Then when we book airline (also usually as soon as we can....especially for prime March break time), we will switch to non-refundable if it is cheaper than our booked refundable price. Usually this is not the case though as prices rise.

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2 hours ago, spursfreak21 said:

Do you just book the cruise and hope you can find an reasonable accompanying flight later? 

Another, yup to the list. I too as mentioned, do mock searches to get an idea of prices (but know that's in no way an indication of what my flight cost will be) but also to get an idea of what routes various airlines fly.

I also consider convince when determining what is a fair price. JetBlue for example flies to MCO from SWF which usually comes with a higher cost but I could walk to SWF so if it's $100 more, so be it. I'll save more than that in parking at EWR or similar, plus gas, toss, etc.

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