The Disney Cruise – A Family Holiday for Parents?

A Disney cruise is a family holiday with a dawn till dusk kids club, run by a company that have some pretty good credentials when it comes to children’s entertainment.   Oh and did I mention you get dropped off for a day on an island in the Bahamas?

Once you have kids, it takes a little while to realise that the concept of “the holiday” as you may have once known it, is on hold for, oh well, like the next 10-18 years.  You go on a journey of discovery whereby you cling to the dream for a while.  Then you have “that flight”.  You’ll take your offspring out in the pushchair somewhere in the Balearics on a balmy evening and pretend you didn’t notice the snub from the surfer babe in hot pants handing out flyers to the cool bars.  You truly believe that the kind of posh hotels you used to stay in are fully equipped with all the things you might need as a parent, until they turn up with a travel cot that looks like a rabbit lived in it once.  Then you get real, sack off your old vacation dreams and sign up to the Butlin’s loyalty club.

What the Disney cruise offers, thus, is promise of maybe tipping the holiday fun scales back in your favour, not insignificantly – all while your kids have a holiday of their childhood lifetimes.  Everyone is winning!  Disney is especially “winning” as your end of holiday bank balance scoreboard will show, but hey, if it’s the price to pay?

So, in March this year, Family Wilson did it.  Our trip was a 3-night voyage departing from Port Canaveral, Florida, on the Disney Wonder, with the aforementioned day’s docking at Castaway Cay.  All you need to know about is that it’s an island in the Bahamas, and that image that just popped into your head of glorious sandy beaches and clear aquamarine waters, well, that’s exactly how it is.

But wait, I know what you’re thinking.  Cruising per se may not feel like something appropriate for under 60s, let alone under 10s, but go with it for a bit.  Back in those heady days when my husband and I went on actual holidays, we did a Royal Caribbean cruise, and whilst we’d only admit it in certain circles, it was amazing. Disney follows much the same formula in terms of the way you get fed, entertained and accommodated.  Disney however, provides considerably more princesses and talking animals.

The best bits:

Food:  As per all cruises, this was immense.  Breakfast and lunch were for the most part buffet format, whereby if you could think of a food, it was on that buffet somewhere.  In the evenings, you took your turn in 3 different themed restaurants where you were assigned a waiting staff team that followed you to each one.  The menus for these were fabulous, the waiters incredible; attentive, funny, capable of magic!   Each restaurant had some kind of themed entertainment, from live music to character parades.  Good food, kids distracted enough for you to savour it. This!  This wins all things.

Entertainment:  Every night after dinner was a show.  This meant after a fabulous dinner, you could sit in the dark, digesting food while your kids get entertained into sleepiness.  Win.

Kid’s Club:  This really was phenomenal.  It doesn’t get much better than being able to put your children in the care of Disney approved play instructors.  Bye kids!  See you at dinner! (Or maybe not…see bad point 1 below)

The Bahamas:  No words needed.  It’s the Bahamas.

Downsides?

Kids club call back tolerance:  I believe they were far too accepting of my kid’s requests to call us back to come and collect them.  When my 5 year old says, after 1 hour of being there, that he wishes to be collected, HE DOESN’T MEAN THAT!  Please don’t call us back!  Like for at least 4 hours?  5-year-olds don’t really know what they need.

Tipping:  As a Brit, American tipping etiquette can be hard to navigate.  Tipping on a cruise ship however, is a whole different fanny pack of worms.  On your penultimate evening you are given a series of envelopes with suggested large sums to put therein.  Then you realise these amounts have been deducted from your bank account anyway.  Don’t get me wrong, Disney cruise staff are incredibly deserving of large tips, for real.  I just don’t get much pleasure in this method, which is simply a surcharge.  It feels like to actually reward these people you have to add a tip to the tip.  (I suppose we could always re-mortgage the house darling?)

Anyway, as family holidays go, a Disney Cruise, by definition is always going to be a winner and never again in your life will you be as happy to be on a big boat with a mouse infestation.

Conclusion:  If you get the chance, do it.  Just use Disney magic to lose any kid’s club call back devices you are offered (shhh).