So I finally had my appointment yesterday to book my
DCL cruise through airmiles - 8 looooong days after first calling (seeing the cruise price go up and the Can $$ tank was stressful, luckily the cabins weren't selling out fast on the deck we wanted). They were supposed to call me between 3 and 5, but instead called at 11 am. Good thing I had given my work number!!! It was AGONISING!!! Took over an hour, my god they really do not want us to use our miles. Anyways, for a 7-day Western Carribean cruise March 3-10 2018 on the Disney Fantasy, for 2 adults and 3 kids (4, 7 and 10 at the time of cruising), cat 4C verandah family stateroom, I paid the 20% deposit and the AM booking fee (of 30$ per person + tax) by credit card, and now I have until late November to accumulate roughly 69,000 airmiles to offset the rest of the cruise price minus taxes which needs to be covered by cash (taxes ends up being more than on the DCL website, as they also include fuel surcharges from the main cruise price, etc, so lame). That should save me a little over 7000$ Canadian (I forgot my scribbles at home for exact numbers), not that I'm going to get nearly that much. But last time I had paid for a 4 day cruise, 5 3-day park tickets (before they discounted the prices of course), and 5 Seaworld passes, and that was close to 50,000 airmiles. So now I have a goal!!!
Right now I only have 8716 airmiles, and I was quoted this would give a savings of 958$.