Our family recently went on our fifth vacation on board Disney Cruise Line. We’re by no means experts, but we thought we knew pretty much everything we would need to know. Turns out, we did learn a few new things, so I thought I would share them in case any of them are new to you too. These are not necessarily new to the cruises, so it’s possible that everyone else knew about these and we just missed them!
1) Princess Meet and Greet Tickets
This one is actually a fairly recent change on the ships. A couple of weeks before our cruise, my husband read a thread on the DISboards that said tickets were being given out for an assigned time to meet the princesses and Anna and Elsa. Considering that we were traveling with our three-year-old princess-obsessed daughter, I am so glad he saw this! When we got on board, the first place we went was to the Port Adventures desk to get our tickets. They assigned us a time, but we were able to change it due to a conflicting event for work. I’m not sure if the times can always be changed. Some friends of ours stayed concierge and they received tickets in their stateroom for the meet and greets. The Princess meet and greet was held in the lobby, like many of the normal character meets, but you did have to present your ticket to get in line. I’m glad we were able to get our tickets, but I felt really badly for families who didn’t know about it. One little girl was sobbing, because she could see the princesses in the lobby, but wasn’t able to meet them. Luckily, there were other princess meets available, so I know she got to meet them later in the week. The “big ticket” was the Anna and Elsa meet in Animator’s Palate.
The sisters were not available to meet anywhere around the ship during the week, so you had to have a ticket if you wanted a photo. A ship photographer was present, but you could use your own camera as well. The ticket system is an interesting change for the cruise line, where the characters have always been so accessible to everyone.
2) Shutters photo packages
Shutters is the photography service available on board the ship. You will see the photographers everywhere – they are set up most evenings in the lobby for formal night and pictures with the characters, as well as coming around at dinner on Pirate Night.
This time, we purchased our photo package before we sailed, which saved us about 15%. Since we knew ahead of time that we were buying the CD, we made sure to get our photo taken everywhere we could. However, here’s where we learned something new. We were under the impression that all photos were included. Our boys, ages 8 and 6, spent a lot of time in the kids clubs, specifically the Avengers Academy (we were on the reimagined Disney Magic). One of the neat things there is that the kids can get their photos taken as part of a virtual reality experience where they are “suited up” as Iron Man. Our boys came back so excited and said they were told that the photos would be available in Shutters later in the week. We thought, “Perfect! They’ll be added right to our CD.” Well, we were wrong. These photos were apparently taken by a different photo service and were available for purchase at $30 per photo. With both kids having done the experience, this was a large amount that we were not expecting to have to pay. And no, we didn’t have to buy the photos. But all week, we’d been thinking they would be added to our account, so the boys were looking forward to it. It’s kind of hard to tell them no in that moment.
One more disappointment – on the last night, we’d been looking forward to getting our picture taken with Captain Mickey and First Mate Minnie. We got in line early, only to find out that there were no Shutters photographers present. We were told that they don’t take photos the last night, because they’re busy getting all the print photos ready. Luckily, we have a nice camera, so we took our own photos, but we had been hoping to have these added to our CD as well. If you were a family who didn’t bring a nice camera with you and planned to have Shutters take all your posed pictures, that could be a problem.
One positive thing we discovered about Shutters – they are out on the beach at Castaway Cay! We saw one of the photographers walking around and asked her to come take a few pictures. As a result, we got some great photos of our kids playing in the ocean, a place where we weren’t comfortable having our camera out! (Please ignore the chocolate face – there’s free ice cream on Castaway Cay!)
3) Room Service
This one isn’t a big deal, just something that we discovered. Room service can’t be left in a stateroom after 9:00pm if no one is in the room. Our kids like to have cookies and milk in the evenings on a cruise, so every night, we would call and place an order. It never came in the same length of time every night, so once, we ran down to pick up the kids from the club and the crew member came in the five minutes we were gone. We had thought they could leave it on the bed if we happened to be gone, but when they came back later, we were told they couldn’t enter a room at night if no one answered the door. It’s a good policy, just not one we were aware of.
4) Check-in and Check-out privileges for the kids clubs
This is the first cruise that we’ve had a child old enough for this privilege. We really debated on whether or not we would allow him to check himself in and out. We asked some questions on the DISboards and were given a lot of great advice for rules and restrictions for our son, if we did decide to grant him this privilege. When we got to the terminal and registered the kids, they asked if we wanted Jacob to have check-in/out privileges. I asked if he could just have check-in privileges, because we thought this would save some time if he could leave dinner and head to the kids club once he was done eating. Unfortunately, you can’t have just one or the other. But, we were told that the privilege can be removed if needed. We went ahead and decided to let him check in and out, knowing that if it became a problem, we could remove that option. He actually thrived with the responsibility and proved to us how seriously he took this, always coming straight back to our room or meeting us exactly where we told him to. We did take away the privilege while he was in Scuttle’s Cove on Castaway Cay, since we didn’t have an exact location at which we could tell him to come find us. The crew member was able to just uncheck the box in the computer and then reassign the privilege once we were back on the boat.
5) Friendship Rocks!
For the last couple of days on the cruise, our older son kept talking about a slideshow of photos that were taken in the kids club over the week. He said that the slideshow would be shown at 5:00 on the last day. That’s all the information we had about it, so at 5:00 on the last night, we headed to the kids club. The counselor at the front desk told us that it was in the theater and if we hurried, we could still make it. We ran to the theater and when we got there, a counselor grabbed the kids, checked them in, told them they were too late for the blue group, stuck a yellow shirt on them that said “Friendship Rocks” on it and sent them backstage. We were a little confused about what was going on. My husband and I sat down and waited. A couple minutes later, a group of kids wearing blue “Friendship Rocks” shirts came out on stage and did a choreographed routine with a couple of the counselors and Mickey and Minnie. After one song, the kids in the yellow shirts came out and danced to the music.
A slideshow was then shown, full of pictures and videos that had been taken in the clubs all week. After the show was over (about 20 minutes), all the kids were taken to the club and we had to go there to check them out (they got to keep the shirts!). It would have been nice to know in advance that it was an actual event. All our son knew was that they were showing some pictures. If we had been notified that it was a stage show, we would have been a little earlier and not been so rushed. Our kids also got nervous when they found out they were going on stage and we could have talked about it in advance. Our middle child didn’t even end up participating because he got so nervous. That being said, it was a really neat way to end the cruise and see some of what went on during the week in the clubs. I’m not sure if this has been offered on any of our other cruises and we just missed it?
What about you? Have you learned anything interesting on any of your cruises that might be able to help one of us in the future?
