Canal: 11 day on Brilliance or 15 day WB on Disney Magic

[flagger]

I have a DCL cruise booked for December (eastern Carib). I just booked an 11 day Brilliance cruise for March 2008 with the following itin:

 

MIA

SEA

Labadee

SEA

CURACAO

ARUBA

SEA

PANAMA - Cristobal Pier

CARTAGENA

SEA

SEA

MIA

 

DCL has just announced their 2008 itin which takes the Magic to the Pacific Coast in the summer. Their WB Canal crossing is a 15 DAY cruise:

 

May 10th PORT CANAVERAL

CASTAWAY CAY

SEA

SEA

ARUBA

SEA

PANAMA CANAL

SEA

SEA

ACAPULCO

SEA

PUERTO VALLARTA

CABO

SEA

SEA

May 25th LAX

 

Pricing will not be released until the 31st of January. I am thinking of cancelling both cruises and booking the Westbound cruise to go through both sets of locks.

 

What would you do based on those ports? We will be late 30somethings and DD will be almost 5 years old.

[cb at sea]

That's alot of sea days for a 5 year old! (For my hubby, too--He doesn't mind one or two sea days, but on our Panama cruise, he was too through!) (He's not a "pool" person AT ALL!)

[mdmourges]

I don't think there will be many kids your child's age on the RC cruise. I have done the 10 days PC around that same time and that is what I found. But the 15 dayer with all those sea days is going to prove to be a long time for a 5 year old as well. I am not sure either is really something a 5 year old will have fun on but with the possibility of having a lot more kids his/her age on the DC, I would lean toward that.

 

Mark

[flagger]

She loves sea days and I know they will have Adventure Ocean open which she begged to go to on our FOS cruise. She has been with us for 3 other cruises before she was old enough and we always found plenty to do.

 

It is really going to depend on rates I think. The current DCL cruise is this December and seeing it and the World all decorated for Christmas is something we want to see as well.

[FunCruiser56]

It does not sound like much of an itinerary for DCL. We have been on the Brilliance 11 day and the ports were wonderful and yes there were enough kids on the ship to keep each other happy. We watched them playing in the kids pool area and they were getting some nice concentrated attention from the counselors.

Our family loves disney, too bad there cruise line is so overpriced. We get our Mickey Fix at Disneyworld then head on down to So Florida for our cruise on RCI, we get both for what Disney wanted for their cruise only. I will say though that Disney has it down on their ships as far as kids are concerned we could hardly get our son out of the kids club.

 

Good luck with your planning.

 

Bev

[wrp96]

It does not sound like much of an itinerary for DCL.

 

I have to agree with this. While I love the idea of 15 nights on the ship, the DCL itinerary doesn't take advantage of any of the rarely visited ports on the West Coast that it could reach on the transcanal cruise. All of the DCL stops are ones that you can get to on either a pure Caribbean cruise or a pure Mexican Rivieria cruise. In fact, the Brilliance itinerary with it's stop in Cartagena would be an opportunity to see a rarely visited port. Personally I would not give up 2 cruises for the 1 DCL itinerary (maybe if it had some unique stops).

 

We have been on the Brilliance 11 day and the ports were wonderful and yes there were enough kids on the ship to keep each other happy. We watched them playing in the kids pool area and they were getting some nice concentrated attention from the counselors.

 

I definitely agree with this. While our Brilliance cruise itinerary had few kids onboard, the ones I saw were having a great time.