What's the best piece of cruise advice you've ever been given?

[jsn55]

Only takes one experience of sleepless nights while your partner's in a Paris hospital ... desperately checking the limits on your credit cards and worrying about how this will be handled.  And I didn't even need to worry about anything but the hospital bill, since we had carried MedJet for years.  "Emergency Medical Evacuation" is exactly what it sounds like, and getting home after a medical disaster is a huge hurdle without that coverage.

[lifes-a-beach]

There's a whole section on the insurance topic. 

 

https://boards.cruisecritic.com/forum/499-cruisetravel-insurance/

 

Definitely read up on it.  Unless you wanna wake up in a hospital in some third world country and be stuck there, get good insurance.

Edited Tuesday at 04:00 PM by lifes-a-beach

[Shorex]

Don't book a cruise for the singular purpose of having a certain "once in a lifetime" experience. Could be something like seeing the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio, or taking an excursion to see the ruins of ancient Troy, or taking an excursion to visit the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, or whatever. Any scheduled cruise port stop can be missed for a variety of reasons; rough seas, emergency medical evacuation, a port workers strike, and so on.

 

 

[CDNPolar]

6 hours ago, Shorex said:

Don't book a cruise for the singular purpose of having a certain "once in a lifetime" experience. Could be something like seeing the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio, or taking an excursion to see the ruins of ancient Troy, or taking an excursion to visit the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, or whatever. Any scheduled cruise port stop can be missed for a variety of reasons; rough seas, emergency medical evacuation, a port workers strike, and so on.

 

 

Excellent advice.  You must be flexible and accept that your main reason for the cruise may be missed.

 

We booked a Baltic Sea cruise for the specific reason to visit St. Petersburg and then the war broke out and that was dropped along with Finland and Estonia.  We decided to go anyway, but Russia at the time of booking was our main draw.

[imready2go]

On 10/20/2024 at 1:32 PM, cruise-again said:

Can't believe nobody  has mentioned :  BUY TRIP INSURANCE!  Why!  Not for change of plans, delays in connections or lost luggage - although most plans do help to lessen the pain of those events - but for medical illness of injury.  If you become seriously ill, or break a leg or something like that, the cruise line is obliged to get you to the nearest medical facility which can treat you.  Trip insurance will find and arrange treatment and transportation home in facilities as close to US standards as possible.  Without insurance it is extremely expensive.  Buy the insurance the cruise line partners with, or buy it on the internet; but don't go on a cruise without it, unless you are an extremely high roller gambler.  The cost is very reasonable for the piece of mind you will have..  I KNOW!

So true!!  Several years ago my partner had a heart attack the night before departure. He had quadruple by-pass and the insurance paid off as we went on the same cruise 1 year later!!!

[CDNPolar]

10 hours ago, imready2go said:

So true!!  Several years ago my partner had a heart attack the night before departure. He had quadruple by-pass and the insurance paid off as we went on the same cruise 1 year later!!!

 

Hope your Partner is doing well, and thank goodness that it happened before you boarded the ship!

 

 

[imready2go]

5 hours ago, CDNPolar said:

 

Hope your Partner is doing well, and thank goodness that it happened before you boarded the ship!

 

 

Thank you.  I don't mean to be a downer on this post, but he did recover fully and a couple of years later he died in a plane crash.  But I have healed and am now going on Reflection on Nov 4.  Life goes on.