Useful tips for the first-time Disney cruiser: BEFORE the cruise

Big S and Lil S grew up with Disney books and movies. They can belt out Poor Unfortunate Souls and I’ll Make a Man Out of You like nobody’s business. But we are not a Disney-fanatic family. We are also not a cruising family. Before our Disney cruise, we had only ever gone on one cruise, when Big S was an infant.

In some ways, experiencing Disney (whether Disney World, Disneyland, or a Disney Cruise) feels like a rite of passage for kids. We knew we had to do it at least once. Big S and Lil S are at the perfect age (8 and 6) where they can actively participate in most things, but still fall for Disney magic. When we were looking for a stress free, short (one week or less) trip to round off our year, and celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary in the fall, we bit the bullet and booked a Disney cruise.

And as Disney-enjoyers-but-not-fanatics and non-cruisers, our verdict is this: a Disney cruise is magical, expensive, fun, and both stress-free and stressful.

If you are also Disney-enjoyers-but-not-fanatics and cruising novices looking to book a Disney cruise, we hope you’ll enjoy our walk-through on how to minimize the bad, and maximize the magic!

(If you’re already booked your Disney cruise, don’t forget to check out our post on useful tips during your cruise!)

**Reasons to book a Disney cruise**

• You like/love Disney.
• Your kids like/love Disney.
• You want someone else to take care of your kids while you relax! (This was perfect for us to get in some couples time for our anniversary, but still know the kids were having a great time.)

These, actually, are the main perks of booking a Disney cruise, over any other cruise or similar vacation (resort, beach, etc).

From the decor, to the food, to the shows, to the many Disney characters, you will be immersed in the mouse from the moment you step onto the ship. You don’t have to be a Disney know-all to be pulled into the magic. And you will also be surrounded by other passengers who are dressed in costume, or wearing Minnie ears, which adds to the vibe.

Disney cruising is the most kid friendly experience we have ever had. Their Kids Club keep the kids occupied for hours. Animatronic characters keep kids entertained through dinner (and if that fails, every dinner the kids had a placemat they could colour with little games to play). And the service was out of this world. Our servers knew exactly what the kids liked by the second night, and even cut up the kids’ food for them!

When to book a Disney cruise for good deals?

A Disney cruise is going to be expensive however you slice it.

The best time to book a Disney cruise with consistently lower prices is as soon as the cruise dates are released. This is usually 1.5 – 2 years in advance of the sail date:

• Feb-Mar the year prior for summer sailings
• May-June the year prior for winter sailings
• 2 years prior for fall (Sept and Oct) sailings

Keep an eye out for special deals on the Disney Cruise Line website

You can also keep an eye out on special rates and deals on the Disney cruise website. Some of those deals include special rates for Canadians, veterans, Florida residents, Disney+ members, children sail free. The deals are usually between 25-35% off.

Special deals only apply to specific cruises and dates, so don’t rely on these if you have your heart set on a time or destination.

Consider transatlantic cruises

A deal that was *very* tempting for us was the transatlantic sailing. Every year, around May (US to Europe) and Sept (Europe to US), Disney will “re-position” its ships to and from their European destinations. These sailings are usually longer (11 or 13 days), and way cheaper. The one we were eyeing was $7500 USD for 11 days for our family of 4, as opposed to the one we settled on: $4500 USD for 5 days! The “downside” of these are more sea days (but better for enjoying the cruise amenities), and increased chance of rough sea days. You have to buy 2 one-way flights, but this may even be cheaper if the cruise departs or lands closer to where you live!

Do not be overly concerned about the ship itself

I will probably be eviscerated by true Disney cruising fans for saying this.

Disney has 6 ships as part of its fleet (with more coming on the horizon). Some are bigger, newer, and certain ships only sail to certain destinations.

Especially for your first Disney cruise, we recommend not being too caught up on which ship you’re sailing on. While each ship has their own themed dining rooms, shows, waterslides, etc – they are more or less “equivalent” across the ships, and provide the same kind of magic. (Of course, we’ve only taken 1 sailing, but we’ve compared notes with friends and families who have cruised Disney.) Unless you have a particular love for a certain movie or character (Frozen, for example, is aboard the Disney Wish), you will be treated to a sampling of Disney’s very best whichever ship you sail.

Your ship will make more of a difference on repeated sailings, because you do want to experience different shows, themed rooms, and even characters!

Are “themed” cruises worth it?

Some Disney cruises are “themed” to a particular holiday. Christmas and Halloween are the main ones. There are specific sailings for “Pixar days” too. These cruises, because they are allegedly more coveted by fans, tend to be more expensive.

We ended up cruising on a Halloween ship (“Halloween on the High Seas”). This was more logistical than anything else, not because we’re all that crazy about Halloween. We had one night that was Halloween themed. The kids had “trick or treating”, and we had a Halloween dance party. The characters dressed up in costume, and special characters showed up (for Halloween, we had Jack and Sally, and Captain Jack Sparrow). The ship was decorated to match the theme (eg. a pumpkin tree in the atrium, jack-o-lantern stickers on the portholes). There were also some Halloween collectibles in the gift shops.

Halloween night was fun, but we don’t think you need to pay the premium for a themed cruise, particularly for your first one. You will have more than enough on-board activities to occupy your time, and enough to experience without it. In fact, we felt the additional Halloween activities made our cruise more stressful, as we had to be at more things at specific times. And the lines for the character meets were crazy long on Halloween day! The theme seemed to be important for fans who “collect” different Disney experiences – for example, seeing Mickey in his Captain’s outfit on day 1, and him in his vampire costume on Halloween night.

Picking your Disney cruise staterooms

Types of staterooms

Disney cruises offer interior rooms, rooms with portholes, and rooms with verandahs. If you are sailing on a shorter cruise, the difference between them may not be all that significant. (We booked a verandah room for our 5 days cruise, because it was only $300 more than an interior room!)

If the cost difference was significant, we would have selected a room with portholes. You get a nice view, without having to worry about curious kids trying to open veranda doors. We recommend verandas if: 1) your kids sleep much earlier than you – at least you have a place to relax after the kids go to bed, or 2) you are cruising to Alaska/Scandinavia. You do not want to miss those views.

And really, we wouldn’t have minded an interior stateroom, either. These rooms have “magical portholes”, which are screens that show the scenery, and characters you can interact with. You don’t spend too much time in your stateroom, anyways.

Disney cruises also offer concierge level rooms at a significantly higher price. Unless you really want to splurge, we don’t feel this is necessary to enjoying a Disney cruise.

Choosing your stateroom location

When you book, you will be allowed to choose your specific stateroom. Where you select your statement could be important depending on: noise, ease of access to other parts of the ship, and chance of sea-sickness.

If you want a quieter stateroom, I would avoid the level below the pool deck/buffet, and the level above the atrium/theatre/restaurants/kids club (for us, this was 4 and 5). If you want less foot traffic, book your room away from the stairs/elevator, with the caveat it’ll take you longer to get to and from your room. Our room was a fair trek from the elevator, but the kids liked it – they enjoyed looking at the decorated stateroom doors. The ship has public spaces on the lower levels, the upper decks, and the front and back. No matter where you are, you will have to do some walking, but not too much!

If you are prone to seasickness, try to pick a stateroom as close to the middle (both top-bottom and aft-forward) of the ship as possible for more stability.

Download the Disney Cruise Line Navigator App

**You MUST download the DCL Navigator App.**

Before your cruise, you can reserve your sailing and book on-board activities and excursions through the website. BUT you can do this just as easily if not easier through the app. The app is personalized to your sailing. It has a cute countdown to your departure date, and tons of info about your ship.

When you are on the cruise, you need the Disney Cruise App for your daily schedule, including where you will be dining. This App works without a wifi package. You can also message other cruisers (family or people you meet on the cruise) directly through the App, without buying wifi.

Booking on-board cruise activities

This is tricky for the first time cruiser. And one of those things that can make the cruise stressful.

As you sail on more Disney cruises, you will move up the tiers of their cruise loyalty program, Castaway Club. Even after your first cruise, you will have some perks of a Castaway Club membership. This status is especially important for booking activities and excursions, which open up earlier depending on your Castaway Club status.

For first timers, activity and excursion bookings start 75 days prior to sailing. I logged into the App that evening, and many of the bookings were already full. This includes things like adult/specialty dining, liqueur/wine tasting, Princess tea party, and the Bibbiti Bobbity Boo boutique for the princesses among us. If you are not too picky, there will still be some activities to choose from (eg. the popular adult dining, but on embarkation night only).

The only activity that opens at the same time for everyone is the Royal Gathering – the princess meet and greet. This opens at midnight, usually the same day check-in starts for first-timers (30 days prior to departure). So get ready to set those alarms!

We met a lot of people who were disappointed not to get a spot in their preferred activities. But I really want to reassure you, as first time cruisers especially, there is *plenty* to do without add-on activities. And simply relaxing on a deck lounger is a darn-good alternative, too! We initially wanted to book an adult meal to celebrate our anniversary. But we quickly found that the rotational dining was more than enough to satisfy us. (Our kids checked themselves out of dinner mid-way through most nights, so we still had some alone-time for ourselves!)

If there is an activity you are dying to experience, you can always check with guest services, or dining services, after you embark on the first day. Quite often the cruise will reserve spots for on-board booking.

Booking port excursions

The same applies to booking excursions as on-board activities. Higher level Castaway Club members get to book in advance.

Keep in mind for port excursions, however, that you do not need to book excursions through the cruise line. You can book private excursions, private transport, or simply just walk around the port/destination at your leisure. We were scheduled to dock in Bermuda, the cruise transfer to the beach was quadruple the cost of taking a bus or private hire!

The caveat if you do not book through Disney, is you must leave yourself plenty of time to get back to the ship. If you book an excursion with Disney, the ship will wait if you are late (imagine if your bus breaks down or gets stuck in traffic). If you booked a port adventure on your own, the ship will NOT wait.

Do you need to buy an internet package?

Disney has several tiers of wi-fi packages to choose from. The Stay Connected package (even more basic than the Basic package :P) starts at 12 USD/day, up to the Premium package, which is 36 USD/day. Phone services are separate. If you are in the US and have AT&T or Verizon as your carrier, you can buy your cruise phone package directly from your carrier.

We personally didn’t feel we needed an internet package. We had all our cruise information on hand using the DCL Navigator App, and could text each other through the app. Staff (eg. at the Kids Club) can reach you using the App as well. The cruise kept us busy all day long. Even if you miss your streaming service, you can catch a movie in their luxurious theatre and on the big screen on the pool deck, or watch a Disney show on your stateroom TV.

Do you need to tip in advance?

Before you cruise, you will also have the option to tip your staff in advance. You have 4 main staff to tip: your stateroom host, your dining room head server, main server, and assistant server.

You can select this option if you want, but we found it doesn’t make things any easier. On the final day, you will get envelops to leave addition gratuities for the same staff. We found it was easier to do it all at once. You can either tip in cash or charge it to your on-board account.

If you buy any other services on board or schedule private dining, you will need to tip separately. 18% gratuity is automatically applied to bar and spa services.

Disney cruise rotational dining and dining times

Our cruise experience is limited, but we enjoyed the fact that we were assigned a different dining room every night. (Various dining rooms will also be open for sit down breakfast and lunch.) The decor and menus matched the dining room “theme”. It was nice to change things up without having to worry about the stress of making the decisions ourselves. 😛 Your servers rotate with you every evening, which the kids really appreciated because they really take the time to get to know them.

Dinner seating times explained

There are 2 seating times. The first is at 5:45pm-6:00pm (depending on the cruise), and the second at 8:00pm-8:30pm (the European cruises are the 8:30pm). You are automatically assigned a time, which you can request to change if you prefer the other one. If you are unable to get this changed prior to boarding, you can always go to dining services after you board to request this. You can also specify whether you want a private table, a table closer to a screen, and any dietary restrictions.

Dinner with young children

The 2nd seating tends to be quite late for most young kids, so the 2nd seating is usually quieter. The other consideration is there will also be 2 seatings for the evening show (so you can alternate between dinner and show). If you have young kids, they will be tired either for dinner or show, so it’s a trade off. I found the Disney cruise shows to be the highlight of the cruise. It felt like watching a Boardway production every night! We watched the show first and had the 2nd seating. The kids were pretty tired, but the servers worked hard to keep them happy, and they usually went back up to the stateroom midway through dinner anyway to unwind with some TV.

Don’t forget there is always an option to eat/feed your kids earlier or later with room service, in case the schedule on a particular day isn’t working out for you.

Disney door decor

Cruise doors are magnetic, and they all look the same. Therefore, it’s become a cruise tradition to decorate your stateroom door with magnets to help you find your room.

Disney cruise passengers can take this to the next level. We saw so many personalized character magnets. Some had names and others documented some special occasion (a first cruise, or birthday or anniversary). Some cruisers put a ton of work into their door. We saw Rapunzel themed doors, the Nightmare Before Christmas doors, and doors with little string lights. Because it was Halloween, some even had little candy bowls for the kids to help themselves! The only thing to keep in mind is you cannot use tape on your door. If you want to stick something to your door, it must be magnets or magnetic hooks.

You don’t have to decorate your door, of course. But it really seems to add that extra bit of magic to your cruise and is worth buying/making. Some crafty passengers used Circut to make their own decorations. There are tons of Disney cruise magnets on Etsy – they can run anywhere between $20-50. You don’t need to go overboard – a few magnets go a long way to hype up the kids. A friend loaned us a large pair of Mickey hands, and the kids looooved their decorated door. They also loved looking at other doors as they walked around the ship.

Pixie dusting vs Fish extenders

This is both my favourite topic, and my least favourite topic. It’s my favourite because the kids absolutely loved it – and that made it really special. It’s my least favourite because of all the plastic trinkets you accumulate and most of the time have to throw out or leave behind, and it adds to the stress of cruise planning. (Check out our post specifically on pixie dusting here!)

Fish extenders

If you have never cruised Disney, these terms are probably completely foreign to you. Fish extenders are small gift exchange groups you can sign up for on your cruise’s social media pages. You have maybe 5-10 other staterooms to put together personalized gifts. During the cruise, participated leave “fish extenders” (basically glorified closet organizers) on their cabin hook, and the gifts get dropped off into these.

Pixie dusting

Pixie dusting is less commitment, but you still get to experience the fun. You bring along small tokens (usually magnets or stickers or small toys and candies) and drop them off into other people’s fish extenders at random, and others can do the same for you. We did this, and even pixie-dusting took a fair amount of planning. You have to buy the gifts and then individually package and label the gifts. Some people printed off “Pixie dusting” labels with their name and stateroom number. We just wrote ours by hand on mickey shaped labels.

Big S and Lil S *loved* finding little gifts in our fish extender. (I literally bought a closet organizer off Amazon and stuck on those same mickey labels.) They also liked walking around the ship dropping off gifts for other people. If you have children (or are a child at heart), I would consider participating. It 100% does what “pixie dusting” is supposed to do – bring a smile to kids’ faces – but boy, is it extra!

(There is also a cruise tradition of hiding rubber ducks around the ship. Kids also love looking for these. We even found a batman duck!)

Join your cruise’s Facebook group

Every Disney cruise has a Facebook page, which you can find by searching your ship’s name, destination, and cruise dates. These groups are typically run by veteran cruisers. On the page, you’ll find sign up sheets for the fish extenders, as well as pixie-dusting. (As we mentioned, you can “dust” at random, but you do get a list of interested staterooms with genders and ages.) People also organize exchanges for Disney pins, ornaments, and recipes.

Aside from gift exchanges, the Facebook group is a wealth of information for first time cruisers. Veteran cruisers will post info about dining, check-in, activity booking, excursions, disembarkation, favourite ice-cream flavours, and anything cruising novices want to know.

The Facebook group is also a good place to meet people. I saw a ton of posts of parents with kids looking to find other families with similar-aged kids. You can book excursions together, or meet at the kids’ club or nursery.

I’ve heard some of these groups can get confrontational/less collegial. Like all social media, drink in the useful info and leave the rest!

Tips for checking in

Someone on our cruise’s Facebook page posted a check-in guide for first-time cruisers, and it made checking-in extremely easy.

Check-in time

First of all – and I don’t know why Disney does this – check-in opens at midnight, EST. (We can’t all be Cinderella…) You do not *have* to check in when it opens, but you do want to check in as early as you can if you want to snag an earlier port arrival time (PAT). Arriving earlier means you can board earlier, and have more time to enjoy the ship before it fills up. As first-time cruisers, your check-in date is already later than the cruisers who are Castaway Club members.

First-time cruisers also check-in the same time that the Royal Gathering bookings open. The good news is I only had to set my alarm once. The bad news is I was scrambling on two different devices to check-in and book the Royal Gathering. (If you are me, book the Royal Gathering as your check-in page loads – it always seems to take a few minutes. I successfully booked both right away, but I heard many were not so lucky. Which is *fine*, because there are tons of individual princess meets, but at the time it felt stressful.)

Check-in documents

For check-in, you needs to have a scanned copy of your passports (or government issued ID if not traveling with a passport. Consult the Disney Cruise website regarding necessary travel documents). You also need a headshot of every cruiser in your stateroom against a bland-ish background, including kids. You need to upload the files as JPGs or PNGs. Do this ahead of time, and save it into one folder on your computer. You can check in on the DCL navigator app as well (I would use whichever device on where you’ve saved your pictures.)

Being prepared makes checking in a breeze, as you can just upload everything one after the other, and bang, you’re done. Your headshot will be reviewed for acceptability and they will tell you if you need to submit another one. This was much less stressful than I was lead to believe, but it was only because we had all our documents ready.

Final thoughts

Although certain aspects of planning a Disney cruise sound stressful, it wasn’t that bad. (I did not appreciate the midnight wakeup.) We’ve included all the basics, but you can go all out as much or as little as you want. You can join *aaaaall* the gift exchange groups or none at all, print matching t-shirts or family costumes or wear whatever you like. I am fairly confident you can book no on-board activities and still have a great time.

We all had a great time. The adults relaxed, and the kids soaked up the Disney. I can even say this is true, for our cruise diverted from warm and sunny Bermuda… up to frigid and drizzly New Brunswick, Canada! (And as I Canadian, I love Canada, but NB is not where you want to be in October.) We could have grumbled about the lack of sun and beach, griped about the chilly deck parties where we all had to wear fleece and coats. But it’s a testament to the Disney Cruise Line itself that we actually didn’t mind, there was already so much excitement!

If you have questions about your first Disney cruise, drop us a line!