7-Day Southern Caribbean Cruise

St. Thomas

Well we just got another cruise booked and we are excited. We are going with our good friends Ryan and Heather Johnson. It is a Southern Caribbean which departs out of Puerto Rico, San Juan on Feb 27. It will hit:

St Thomas
Dominica
Barbados
St. Lucia
St. Kitts
St. Maarten

These look to be all lush "Hawaiian like" islands.

We booked through the Carnival site directly for this one. They have a new way of booking which I hope will give us some perks. I will try and explain it.

When we called they had two different rates. Ones was for $419. This was just a regular rate. We would put a deposit down and if they price went down (which they most often do) we could submit a repricing form and they would take the difference off our total bill. The catch was you can only do this until the final payment is due, which is on Dec 14. You could also cancel this and get all of your money back before Dec 14.

The other price was the early saver price which was $429. This was a nonrefundable rate. If the price goes down you have until 48 hours before the ship leaves to get the price difference. It will come in an onboard credit. Which works out good since you still need to pay your gratuities which for a 7 day amounts to $140 for 2 people.

We chose the $429 price. And since that same room class was being offered for $419 we immediately submitted at price difference form and it knocked the rate down to $419. So we know have $20 of onboard credit!

Now for the flight. Flying to San Juan is expensive. About $600 round trip. I didn't really want to pay this amount so I started to get creative. Since Southwest doesn't fly into San Juan, we will be using our free tickets to fly into Orlando. From there we will catch a flight directly to San Juan which is $238 round trip. Much better!