Any Advantage?

[fireman's flame]

My sister lives in central Florida so it's easy for us to cruise out of Jax, Tampa, or Port Canaveral.

 

Her husband was saying as how he knew of a company that flew their people from Florida to San Juan to go on a cruise (don't know the cruise line). He thought there must be some advantage for them to have done that.

 

But I researched it and don't see that it's any cheaper to cruise from San Juan than it is from Florida. There are only different ports, but the costs of the same length of time cruises were the same.

 

Does anyone know of any instances where it'd be cheaper - or cost the same including airfare - to fly to another port and cruise from there?

 

I would love to try different ports, for different destinations, but the airfare costs cost more than the cruise itself. We could do two cruises for what it would cost to fly somewhere to do one cruise. I could see the expense if we didn't live within driving distance of three ports.

[JJPNYC]

I was in this situation a few years back trying to decide where to cruise from. What I ended up doing was creating a simple spread sheet that calculated the total "all-in" cost with various scenarios. The factors that I considered were the airfare from city A to city B, C, D, E. The cruise fare from port cities B,C,D,E. The transfer costs to/from airport/pier in cities B,C,D,E (this is key - a taxi in FLL will cost about $15 to the pier, in Houston it's much more to get to Galveston). I then added a factor to account for cruise line preference, etc.

 

It was after building this spreadsheet was I able to come to a conclusion on what I wanted to do. This is a great way of laying out everything in from of you so you are truly comparing apples-to-apples.

[fireman's flame]

Or oranges-to-oranges...it's Florida, afterall, lol.

 

I'll give the spreadsheet idea a try.

[eandj]

The reason to fly out of San Juan is to be closer to the southern caribbean islands. If you are only going for a week and want to do Aruba, Curacao, Marguerita Island etc., you have to leave from San Juan.

 

Leaving form Fla on a 7 day cruise limits how far south you can go.

 

If you are doing a 12-14 day cruise, leaving from Fla will get you almost anywhere.

 

It's all about the ports you want to see.

[fireman's flame]

That was the only difference I could find, was the ports.

 

As far as cost, for the same cruise length - 7 days - there wasn't any savings.

[eandj]

Yes, if I lived in Fla and was open to any Caribbean islands, I'd leave from FT.L'dale or Miami. Airfare to San Juan is costly. However, then you can spend the day in San Juan which is a very interesting city and unlike the other ports in Carribbean.

[jimc_usa]

Yes it would be nice to see San Juan in the daylight as opposed to cruising out of Miami and getting there when it is going dark!

[fireman's flame]

We figured out Miami was only an hour further than Jax from my sister, so we extended our port options and found a 7 day on the Triumph where our day in San Juan will be from 7:00am - 3:30 pm (or rather, more like 9:00am to 2:30pm).