A DISNEY REVIEW FOR ROYAL, CELEBRITY, PRINCESS CRUISERS

First, some background info: I'm 59, DW is 56, DGD is 3. We've cruised about once a year for the past 9 years, mostly on Royal Caribbean, although our last four cruises are Royal's Enchantment OTS, Celebrity Eclipse, Crown Princess, and now Disney Dream. In addition, we had a Carnival Miracle cruise we had to cancel due to Hurricane Sandy, so I read up on a lot of Carnival info. My goal in this review is to try and compare Disney to those cruise lines. I would only add that you can't really compare any of these ships to Allure or Oasis due to their size; we have cruised Liberty OTS which is a much more comparable ship.

We booked our own airfare from Central New York, added a one night pre-cruise stay at Disney's Pop Century. Pop is one of the lower priced Disney properties, but we thought DGD would enjoy all the large cartoon figures (we were right), plus having a full Food Court made things easier. We also booked Disney transfers. This is one area where Disney dropped the ball a bit in my opinion. We had transfers from the airport to Pop, but when we gathered our luggage we couldn't figure out where to go. Disney has a great luggage program where they will send your luggage directly to the ship, but with a pre-night hotel stay I was worried about not seeing our luggage until the cruise. We had to lug 3 suitcases and carry-ons around, asking several airport workers where to go before finally getting the right directions. I guess I expected to see someone holding up a Disney sign (something Royal and Celebrity did for us on other cruises), but we didn't see anyone. Once we found the bus it was only a five minute wait in line to get to the hotel. Read more