Booking flight?

[smplyswt0712]

Hello everyone! As a Floridian, I've never had to pay attention to the process of booking a flight with my cruise, but it looks like the dbf and I are headed to San Juan in April 2017. It wouldn't let me add a flight at this stage in the game and I suspect that's because flight info is not yet available. Any insight into how that works?

 

[reimero]

A really quick look at Delta's website shows they're only accepting bookings up into September, 2016. In my experience, airlines rarely look more than a year out, and even at one year there are often scheduling and/or equipment changes. So my guess is you can't book a flight because they don't know what airlines will be flying at what times for what prices.

Since you're not used to flying before cruising, I would strongly encourage you to build in enough time to account for delays, schedule changes and whatnot. Personally, I find flying in on the day of the cruise to be too risky because I've encountered too many incidents in which I've had 12+ hour airline delays and cancellations.

 

[jrabbit]

book the flights yourself, don't let DCL do it.

Arrive the day before - or earlier

we enjoyed our 4 days in Old San Juan before the cruise.

 

[smplyswt0712]

book the flights yourself, don't let DCL do it.

What makes you say that? Having Disney arrange the transfers and everything sounded convenient.

 

[PrincessShmoo]

What makes you say that? Having Disney arrange the transfers and everything sounded convenient.

Using the cruise line to book airflights typically gets you flights that cost more and are a bit less convenient. They may book you on connecting flights (have to change planes), or late night (red-eye) flights, or Delta (not my favorite airline).

We've found that booking our own flights gets us the times we want and the prices we like.

All that said, we did let DCL book our flights when we did the WBTA several years ago. Mostly because, if you use the cruise line to book your air travel, and there's an issue with you actually landing in time to catch the cruise, they will help you get to the next port for boarding. The price difference only wound up about $100 more for each of us and it was worth the peace of mind. This was shortly after all the air flight interruptions/cancellations because of the volcano in Iceland that erupted.

You can still book DCL transfers, even if they don't do your air travel.