We will be flying cross country to Vancouver for an Alaska sailing on the Infinity. We are using cruise/air from Celebrity and will be traveling with two teenagers. We are unable to spend the night before cruise due to work arrangments. Should we pay the extra $75.00 per person for specific air arrangments or should we just take our chances with their air schedule. Also, do they ever fly you into Seattle and bus you to Vancouver? I don't know if I would like that depending on how long the drive is and on what type of bus you would be riding. If anyone has ever had to deal with this issue or if you have any advise, I would greatly appreciate it.
Check all available air from your closest airport. My closest is Boston, and there's not much. See what would work best time wise. Then see what is the cheapest. You can bet your bottom dollar.. any cruise line will pick the cheapest.. even if you have to board at 3 AM. IMHO air deviation is worth every penny to get what you want.
Yes, people have been flown into Seattle and bussed to Vancouver. There just is not enough air lift to the port to accommodate everyone.
If the $75 deviation will guarantee you flights into and out of Vancouver, then I'd go for it. The cruise lines routinely fly people to Seattle, then bus up to Vancouver.
Also, have you checked on your own airfare into Vancouver? Curious to know if you could do it yourself cheaper, especially when considering adding the $75 deviation fee to the air fare the cruise line is charging you. On the other hand, there is the "safety" factor of booking air through the cruise line when you're flying cross-country on the same day your ship sails.
Given your restrictions as to when you can fly, I would agree with Babette that you should give serious consideration to the air deviation program. First, however, check out all your schedule options as well as the cost of booking the flights on your own. Armed with this information, you can better decide if you want to book your own flights, or book them through the cruiseline using the air deviation option. We booked our own flights using frequent flyer miles for our Alaska cruise and still had to bus to Seattle from Vancouver to return home. (Going, we flew to Anchorage from Boston via Salt Lake City and had a lengthy layover in SLC) So even if you make your own arrangements, you can have difficulties getting desirable schedules.
We let Celebrity do our air arrangements last year when we were on the Mercury in Alaska. Going was a nightmare. We flew TWA out of Boston to St. Louis--a three hour layover then on to Anchorage from where we had a 2 1/2 hour bus ride to the port. We were in transit for almost 22 hours. Going home from Vancouver was a direct flight to Boston on Air Canada--about five hours. Normally we deviate to get the best flights but this was our first trip to Alaska so we did not even know where to begin.
I have booked three cruises with Celebrity. The first I didn't take air deviation......that was a mistake. Next two, we did take avantage of air deviation. I do have a question....were you quoted $75.00 for a deiviation? Both of ours were $35.00/person. Maybe yours is more because it is cross country?
We did not do an air deviation to Alaska. Five of our other Celebrity cruises were a $35 deviation per person. We also did a deviation for Hawaii on Celebrity this April and it is $35 per person .
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