2027 Disney Summer Cruises

[asgur5]

In my opinion all beaches are boring.

Maybe I'm wrong, maybe people do spend thousand of dollars on Disney cruises to go to beaches in the Med. If anyone does that raise your hand.

I raise my hand. Haha.

Admittedly i also add on a land component to the trip before or after (mostly hiking in the alps or going to paris/tuscany).

 

[DCLMP]

The entire point is that the cost of everything in Europe will be higher because the Euro is currently strong against the dollar. That includes restaurants, hotels, shops, excursions, admission to tourist sites, souvenirs, etc. So, even if Disney eats the extra costs and doesn't increase cruise fares this year, everything else about a European cruise will cost more.

I'm not going to reiterate that point a third time, so I consider this discussion to have run its course.

Disney has been sailing in Europe for twenty years. If you can prove that pricing has anything to do with usd/ Euro exchange rate that fluctuates daily l’ll concede.
No one including Disney knows what the exchange rates is going to be next month much less in the Summer of 2027. Any geopolitical event could send money running back to the dollar safe haven.

If you’re so concerned about a lower dollar than the WHY should be as you said…not irrelevant.

You’re also ignoring supply and demand, inflation and the overall economy in Europe and the US.

Demand will drive DCL pricing more than anything.

 

[DCLMP]

I raise my hand. Haha.

Admittedly i also add on a land component to the trip before or after (mostly hiking in the alps or going to paris/tuscany).

Don’t you live in the land of beautiful beaches and sharks.

 

[o&smom]

Exactly. Many people would agree it would be "better" to spend a lot of time in each city to fully absorb the culture. That's why my family typically spends time in the embarkation and/or debarkation city when we cruise in Europe. But that doesn't mean there is no value in visiting countries for just a short time.

On our first Med cruise, over the course of 7 days my 10 year old and 14 year old kids went to a Marc Chagall museum (with dozens of his works), the ruins at Herculaneum, a Galileo museum (with equipment from his time), the Uffizi Gallery, the Sistine Chapel, St. Peter's Basilica, the Pantheon, and the Coliseum. Did that give them a strong understanding of life in France and Italy? Of course not. Did that help them understand the context when things they saw were mentioned in later science, history, and art classes? Of course it did. Yes, we could have flown to Rome, stayed a few days, taken the train to Florence, stayed a few days, then gone on to see Naples and Nice on our own. But given the limited options for finding rooms with 3 beds in Barcelona, I didn't want to do that in 4 other cities too, and I didn't want to drag our luggage on trains, planes, and cars every few days. My husband and I also didn’t want to take off more than 2 weeks of work.

Disney Cruise did have a cruise scheduled to stop in Tunisia in June 2011, but the stop was changed to Sicily around February. That same cruise stopped in Corsica and Malta. I think there was a cruise stop scheduled for Turkey a few years that was changed several months in advance. I am not sure if Disney has plans to try again for the southern Mediterranean, but Malta, Sicily, Corsica, and Croatia have been showing up once or twice a year.

We have been lucky enough to catch most of those ports on our Disney cruises. We went to Tunisia, Malta and Corsica in 2010 on our very first cruise. We stopped in Sicily in 2023. Croatia is definitely on my list!

 

[asgur5]

Don’t you live in the land of beautiful beaches and sharks.

Yes. Lots of white sand and waves and too many sharks.

I prefer european beaches with no sand, towns hanging off giant cliffs, beach clubs and not having to worry about sharks. Although i do miss the waves.

 

[asgur5]

I think you might be failing to take into consideration family dynamics that make cruises a very good option (and in some ways, the only practical option) for many Americans to see Europe and learn about its history.

I have a family of 5. It is incredibly hard to tour Europe on land with this situation. Even our brief pre-stay before the cruise has been very challenging to plan. Very few hotels offer rooms for 5, or guaranteed connecting rooms for 3+2, and those that do are very expensive. Airbnbs are rife with scams and misrepresentations and can be challenging to evaluate if you aren't local (e.g., with "bad" neighborhoods a block away from "good" ones).

One of my kids is special needs. He has a very restricted diet, which Disney cruises accommodates without issues but restaurants on land are less easy to find things he can eat. Families with severe allergies are in a similar boat.

Americans also typically have very limited vacation. The longest I have been able to take off work was 10 days and I still had to work remotely for at least some portion of the day every day of the trip. Even if we went on land, it's not like we have a 4 week holiday to "live like a local". And having a cruise with reliable day care for the kids is helpful if I need an hour to answer emails.

Cruises also allow us to visit more than one place easily over the short period of time we have for vacation. Airfare is simply too expensive coming from the center of the U.S. with no direct international flights (our airfare is more than the cruise cost) for us to make multiple land trips to different destinations in a year--one trip at most is what we get. I can go on a cruise that lets us visit several places in a week. If we tried to do that on land it's a lot of extra wprl--land transportation, accommodations etc.--plus we'd have to pack up every couple days to move somewhere new, and if you've ever packed up a hotel room for 3 kids you'll know that's exhausting.

So when we go on a European cruise, we are not going to go sit on a beach, especially since we could spend far less money to go and sit on a beach in the bahamas or caribbean that's a 2 hr flight away. We explore towns, historical sights like ruins, castles or battlegrounds, go on hikes somewhere beautiful in nature, eat food (other than my special needs kid, who we feed on the boat), and generally try to learn about the places we visit.

As a family of four we realise how lucky we are with travelling. 5 would be so hard accomodation wise when moving about, using hotels and renting cars with luggage.

Apartments and staying in places for longer periods are your only option. Airbnb isnt the only option for apartments now though. Most of the main hotel websites also have lots of apartment stock and they are all legit. Spending a week in paris, or tuscany/rome, berlin, provence, london, or wherever is all very doable now. If you still have some kids under 8 then I can also very much recommend a week in the kids clubs hotels in the austrian alps. They have rooms for 5 and are like a disney cruise on land. Great for snow or summer hiking.

 

[RACHEL_GB]

And I can totally see Europeans and Brits viewing Med cruises very differently than North Americans do. When your local pub is 200 years old and you drive by a church built a thousand years ago or ancient Roman ruins every day on the way to work I imagine seeing more ancient ruins on vacation isn't a high priority. My friends in the UK view the Med in much the same way that Canadians view the Caribbean; as a source of sun, sand and relaxation.

Here's hoping the new summer releases offer something for everyone.

Ha you are definitely onto something there - I studied Latin at school and love a bit of Roman ruins but my partner grew up in Chester, which has an amphitheatre and school children dressed as centurions marching through it everyday chanting - he does NOT want to see ruins on holiday . I am definitely looking forward to hopefully seeing some new ports of call

 

[DCLMP]

Yes. Lots of white sand and waves and too many sharks.

I prefer european beaches with no sand, towns hanging off giant cliffs, beach clubs and not having to worry about sharks. Although i do miss the waves.

There are lots of those type beaches up and down the west coast of California.