Value is very subjective and personal.
Exactly. So...you talk about GF vs Pop...I really liked Pop! Touring GF was interesting, but I have no interest in staying there. The value just isn't there for me.
If you are fine with a smaller room then you can certainly save money with RCCL vs
DCL.
FWIW I haven't noticed any difference in size. With ships, it's all about the use of space, and the space is used equally well IMO in the rooms we've stayed in.
No other cruise line has Mickey Mouse and Tarzan and Daisy and Goofy and two dozen other characters walking around the ship and in shows. No other cruise line in the world shows pre-release and first run Disney movies in their theaters. No other cruise line has ice cream bars shaped like Mickey Mouse. No other cruise line in the world has ships the colors of Mickey Mouse. No other cruise line in the world has Nemo come and talk to you and interact with your and other passengers at dinner.
You've literally just listed nearly everything my family could NOT care less about.
The colors of MM on a ship? This is something for me to be excited about? (I far prefer the clean white aesthetics of the Royal ships)
I've never seen characters just walking around on the ship. (on Royal's Freedom Dreamworks cruise, yes, but not on Disney Dream) Maybe it's a Dream thing, but Nemo hasn't ever come and talked to anyone around us (even when concierge we have not been placed at a table where we would have interaction); it's been Crush. And even then, holy moly I do not care. It's a chaotic, bright, noisy environment and the pictures don't come out right of the food b/c the lighting in there is weird.
DS and DH find value in watching a movie while paying scads for a cruise, but to me it's nearly the biggest waste of time and money I can think of.
Ice cream bars with corn syrup, which turns my son and husband into horrid beasts (something about turning corn into a syrup jacks up the blood sugar like crazy and they become MOST unpleasant). I've had them, they are American-sweet-weird-ingredient tasty, but they aren't something *special*. They're just cheap-ingredient ice cream with chocolate on them.
Aside from these very tangible unique things, the entire atmosphere on a Disney ship is different. It a combination of the crew, the colors of the carpet, the decorations and statues, the pats of butter at dinner and the waffles at breakfast shaped like Mickey, the art throughout the ship, the characters walking around everywhere and most importantly the energy and excitement of little girls walking around dressed up like Belle anxiously waiting for their turn to meet her in person!
Seriously. Butter? That's something worth paying more for? Mickey waffles taste the same as normal waffles.
Having to sidestep all the Belles hopped up on corn syrup solids from the free soft serve, when DCL can't seem to put lines/stanchions up to let people know where the lines are? Nah.
You seem to be looking at cruise ship like a city bus and a hotel.....a mode of transportation to get you from A to B and a hotel to sleep at night.
Yes, that's what many of us see a cruise as being. A cool way of getting somewhere. Exactly. If I wanted
Disneyland/world on the seas, then DCL is it. But I am also paying for port fees and diesel *to take me places*, and I want to go to those places. And other lines take me to those places, without extra stuff that we don't really care about.
if it was not unique, people would not pay 2x or 3x as much.
If it were not *perceived* as being unique, as worth extra, then people would not pay that much more.
What I hate to see is so many people using the price they find because the week the want to sail or the category they want to sail is cheaper on one vs another so they feel the whole
Disney cruise line is no longer a value for anyone else and how evil DCL is now.
But people look at the cruises at the time they can go. Why would one look at another date?
I'm sitting around on costcotravel.com, looking at the "same" cruise next year that we took last year, and looking at the same cruise in 2017 that we took in 2013, and it's painful. I'm not cherrypicking other than "those are the cruises I want to compare", and those cruises are at times we traditionally could go. That's why I'm looking at them.
2013's cruise is now $355 more *per night*. We have cruised category V since then, and I promise you the experience went *down* between 2/2013 and 10/2014. It's not worth any more per night, let alone that much. The October 2014 cruise is now $437 more per night in 2016. Ugh. Not worth it!
I mean, I'd like to hit Gold (it's the collector in me), which means one more cruise, and I imagine DS would like to maybe *see* the Star Wars stuff before he ages out of the club/lab, but then again, I personally don't like doing "once in a lifetime" things, and I feel that it might be cruel for him, to have just the ONE experience (and am I reading things wrong or is the supercool part over in the Club, not the Lab? which is just odd to have it there b/c that's the younger part of the area, and he avoids the Club b/c of the small children underfoot that he does NOT want to squish, having been a 3 year old who got squashed by a big kid at California Adventure). So it's a question. I'm NOT going to go on a cruise I don't find to be a value, though, that's for sure.
And I should mention that I'm comparing almost new prices to prices of cruises that in the past we booked way after the release dates. heck, we upgraded to concierge that first cruise at about 95 days out, so it certainly wasn't "just released" pricing. Just makes it even worse, IMO.
Hmm yet you are going to argue with everyone that DCL somehow does not fit in with the same context of your own definition. Then exactly how is Disney World unique compared to universal. You do not make any sense.
