Carnival Dream Review
We escaped -26 degree temperatures: A group cruise event
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Overview:
I arrived on the Dream with a big crew. Our family group consisted of 18 adults that ranged in age from 23 to 84 with various spending limits and travel interests. I served as the non-professional travel agent and coordinator of the group that was a hybrid of my extended family and my husband's extended family. I am 31 years old and my husband is also 31. All members of this group were traveling from Minnesota. This is the first time that the majority of my party have ever cruised. The Dream was my third cruise and my first trip on Carnival. My two previous cruises were to Alaska and Hawaii on NCL. The Dream cruise planning started with me circulating a Facebook event invite to about 15 households promoting the cruise about four months prior to my suggested sail date. I picked the ship, itinerary and the dates after doing a great deal of research. My husband and I decided that it would get too complicated if we gave a large group of people lots of options for dates or ships, especially because I was inviting a lot of non-cruisers that did not know where to begin with cruise research. Most of the family members that ended up committing to the trip were retired or students and they were very relaxed about the itinerary and the details. Interestingly enough, about third of group traveling with me were family members that I never thought to invite but heard about the trip through word of mouth and decided to join in. I found out the hard way that planning a trip in January for people that work in retail is not such a good plan.
When planning this trip I was focused aggressively on costs and value. Surprisingly, many of my historically cheapskate family members relaxed on budgeting for this trip and this was a big stress relief for me. I was truly scared to death that I would be blamed by my group if expenses ran higher than I originally proposed because I did feel that my group held me responsible for a lot of the details for planning this trip. I will say that costs did run slightly higher than I proposed in my original Facebook invite.