Once we decided we were having a Disney Cruise Line Wedding, the next step was picking a cruise. There are six key factors in determining what cruise you want to get married on.
- Ship: Which ship you sail on
- Port: Where the ship sails out of
- Itinerary: Where the ship visits
- Time of Year: When the cruise sails
- Length: How many nights
- Price: How much it costs
Start with what is the most important to you and work your way to the least important factor. In order, I went with:
- Port
- Time of Year
- Price
- Length
- Itinerary
- Ship
Honestly, deciding the first three decided the rest for me.
Disney Cruise Line currently has four ships: the Magic, the Wonder, the Dream, and the Fantasy. The Wish is coming in 2022 or 2023, and two more unnamed ships will be added to the fleet after that. I actually didn’t start with researching the ships. My first concern was the port they sailed out of.
Now that we had a higher guest count option, our guest list had grown. The cruise we chose would have to leave from Port Canaveral, since it would be the closest and easiest to get to for everyone. With over half of our guests living in the Orlando area, Jay’s parents in Georgia, and mine in Tennessee, Port Canaveral was really the only option.
I had decided some time ago that I wanted a March wedding. Summer is the busy season for Orlando, which makes it hard for everyone to get off work. My birthday is at the end of August and Jay’s is in October, then it’s the holidays, so the end of the year is always crazy for us. I wanted us to be able to plan anniversary trips in the future, without worrying about any of that. So, I started looking at cruises out of Port Canaveral for March of 2020.
This is where the price factor came into play.
I really wanted to do a four-night cruise. My logic was they weren’t much more money than a three-night cruise, and I wanted to have time to enjoy my first Disney cruise, in addition to the time the wedding would take up. My mom pointed out it wasn’t just my money I was spending, so I begrudgingly picked the least expensive three-night cruise in March: Friday March 6th to Monday March 9th on the Disney Dream.
Honestly, going with the three-night instead of the four-night has been my only regret in this process, but I know she was right. Oh darn, I guess I’ll have to go on another Disney Cruise to see the stuff I missed!
There are multiple ways to book a Disney Cruise. You can book directly with Disney Cruise Line online or over the phone. You can go through a third-party travel site, or you can use a travel agent.
As soon as you start doing cruise research, you will see that it is recommended to go through a travel agency so you can get onboard credit, which is where they basically give you a gift card to use on the ship for booking with them. Travel agents are especially helpful for large parties like a wedding because they make sure everyone’s reservations are linked and can handle everything for you.
I did not use a travel agent. Part of me wishes I had, for the stress reduction, but the control freak in me would not allow it. I also had a group of five friends piling in one room and four in another, while all paying separately, so trying to sort that out was a bit messy, and I did not want to inflict that on someone else. So, I wound up booking five out of the nine staterooms myself, through a third-party travel site. I honestly don’t know how the remaining four staterooms booked, but I have a theory they were all through Disney directly. I opted to use a third-party travel site for extremely specific reasons that I cannot go into, but I wouldn’t recommend it for most people. Honestly, if you are a bride planning your own Disney Cruise Line wedding, and are using this for research, I highly recommend using a travel agent. I know a couple of good ones. Please feel free to message me and I will point you their way. I feel guilty I couldn’t give my friends business, but the benefits of the third-party site for us were too great.
Before I booked my cruise reservation, I called Disney Fairy Tale Weddings and spoke to someone named Belle to ensure our chosen cruise was available for a wedding. I know Disney can only accommodate one Castaway Cay wedding per sailing, from research, but I wasn’t sure about the rules for onboard ceremonies. Belle assured me it was available, so I hung up and went to my chosen travel site to book the cruise.
There are websites with cruise sections dedicated to helping you choose a stateroom, so I won’t go into all the room types here. I went with an inside room on deck seven, because I didn’t think we’d be spending a ton of time in the room anyway. The inside rooms also have “magical portholes” that are screens with the outside of the ship and the occasional Disney character, and that sounded cooler than a real window to me. Our fare for just the three-night cruise was $1,944.06.
After getting my confirmation email that the cruise was booked, I got back on the phone with Disney Fairy Tale Weddings, only to find out I had to call the third-party travel site and have them add the wedding package manually.
Well, this was a long annoying process, but also not the end of the world. The person I called had to put me on hold while he called Disney, and that took a while. We actually got disconnected accidentally, and I’m fairly sure he was texting me from his personal cell phone, rather than calling me back and risk losing Disney, once he got them on the line. The questions were basic: like did we want onboard, or on Castaway Cay (onboard) and how many guests did we think we’d have (16 was my guess). There might have been more questions, but those are the two I remember. The most important part was his last message, that said a Disney Fairy Tale Wedding planner would be reaching out to me in the next couple of days.
When you book a Disney Cruise, you have to put down a deposit of 20%, with final payment due 90 days out for cruises five nights and under. This applies to the wedding package as well. So, I put down $388.81 originally, with final payment due on December 6th. When I called to add the wedding package, I had to add to that deposit, bringing the total to $988.81. Our cruise fare with the wedding package added was a total of $4,994.06. Also, because it’s part of your cruise package, a Disney Cruise Line wedding actually has one of the most flexible cancellation policies for a wedding you will find. You can actually cancel and get a full refund up until the pay in full date.
I never wanted to cancel our wedding, but there was a night where I thought we’d have to, less than two months after we booked the cruise. My car’s engine rolled over and died on us overnight, and there was no fixing it. I didn’t see a way to pay off the wedding, pay our regular bills, and take on a new car payment all at once, so I was grateful for this option. Thankfully, I wound up not needing to take it, but I also realize how lucky I was that I didn’t.
I did end up canceling and rebooking several staterooms to shuffle guests around to help keep the costs down for everyone, so the Disney Cruise Line cancellation policy came in handy for that!
In the next installment I will be talking about the process of the wedding planner getting in contact with me and where we go from there.
Out of pocket expenses so far:
Cruise Fare: $1,944.06
Wedding Package: $3,000
Total: $4,944.06
