Help!! Multi-Family Trip Planning

[kcatoir]

O.K. all you who have done this before I would really appreciate all your tips and suggestions.
We are planning a 7day western for our family of 4 for Sept/Oct of 2005.
We invited our best friends to join us and it looks like they are going to come with their family of 5. YEAH!!!!!!!
So now I am starting to worry......how do we arrange to have cabins close together, they may be inviting his parents to come with their neice, so will probably be looking at connecting rooms, even with their family alone. How do we arrange to be seated together for dinner???
Has anyone handled this using All Seasons or Dreams??
I gave them both the web sites to get qoutes. Is one better than another when it comes to multi family booking??

Thanks in advance for all your help,
K.C.

 

[professorandmom]

Dinner seating is NO problem - just ask for all the reservations (once they are made) to be linked (assuming everyone can select the same dinner seating time).

Room location really depends on catagory - if you want to be near each other, catagories need to be selected to do that - catagory 6 and 11 (across the hall) for example. Your TA can help with that. Just a thought, if everyone picks the same catagory - you may be miles apart (seems it) if you leave cabin assignment to chance- the ship is bigger than you think! Simply have the deck plans out when the reservations are made and PLAN!
Barbara

 

[izzinmac]

We did it last November with a group of 22 in 8 cabins. If you make reservations at the same time or close to it, it's easier to get rooms near each other. However, I wouldn't worry too much about that. Other than your friends wanting adjacent or connecting rooms, being spread out is really not much of an issue. But I'm sure either TA can work that issue with enough time. We all used DU and they did a great job for us.

The more important thing is to make sure each reservation is "linked" to the others. This is how Disney insures you eat together as a group. If you make all of them at once, tell the TA to link them. If they are made at different times, when the later ones are made, have the TA link them to the first Reservation #. We have done this on several cruises, and it works well. I would try to use just one TA for the group. Not sure how receptive one TA would be to link reservations to another TA's reservation.

 

[kcatoir]

Thanks for the quick answers,
I didn't know you could have reservations linked together.
We took a 3day last sept so are familiar with the "LARGE" spread of the rooms.
Since we will have 6 kids between us and they are a very close bunch it will be much nicer to be with in a few cabins of each other. We have vacationed together before and almost the from the moment any of the kids wake up they want to start playing.
I think we will request specific cabins.

thanks again
KC

 

[Jillie]

KC (my daughters initials by the way) I also was the "trip coordinator" for our our large group last year. There were 29 of us, including 16 kids/teens. We are a group of friends whose daughters all played AAU basketball together and just get along really well.
We had a cat 4, 3 other families had cat 6, 2 others had cat 8 and i had cat 5 so we were all kind of spread out. We did link our reservations together so we had a grouping of tables with the same servers. It all worked out really well.
You will have so much fun...traveling with a large group can be a blast!! 15 of us are going again next year!!

 

[GenieDana]

Don't forget you can "spread" the kids around on your reservations so the group can book cabins of 4. This is a great way to save money.

Also, don't worry about specific cabins unless you want connecting rooms.

We did a mini family reunion last June, all booked CAT-10 GTY. All 4 cabins got upgraded to CAT-6 by DCL (I believe since the reservations were linked, when one was was upgraded, they all got upgrded). Or, our group was just lucky and DCL was spreading extra Pixie Dust???? Anyway, we were all very fortunate and gratefull.

 

[DMS_cruisers04]

Dana gets the pixie dust for tip of the day!

 

[ivanova]

whoever you book through, make sure that all of the reservations are "linked". When we did this for Nov 2003 for three different families wanting to travel together. We specified that we didn't care if the cabins were close (and then ended up being on 2 different decks, which was okay) but we wanted to make sure that we not only had the same seating time for dinner but also that we were all seated at the same table. By linking the ressies, they were able to seat us all together at dinner. And they told us that even though we had different stateroom categories, had we requested it, we could've been on the same deck fairly close to each other.