This is great. I want to use this. Some improvements are needed:
- When searching Florida to Florida (so as to find roundtrip cruises) the cruises just says Miami Round Trip w/o giving any ideas of where it is going to stop, what region, etc. (see: http://cruisesheet.com/?from=Florida&to=Florida)
- No way to search within a time frame. Say I want to leave after November 18th but before December 12th. There is no way to do this search and sort by price.
- Clicking custom search goes nowhere
- I have not once been able to get the low price you list
Thanks for the feedback. This was just a weekend project, so I have a lot of improvements to make, but not a ton of spare time to dedicate to them. I'll get there, though.
The low price is double occupancy-- a few people have gotten stuck on that, so I have to make it clearer.
Umm: ERROR WITH QUERY: SELECT * FROM deal WHERE added_date >= '2013-11-08' - INTERVAL 30 MINUTE AND from_id IN(19) AND ship_id = ORDER BY cpd ASC LIMIT 0, 100 You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'ORDER BY cpd ASC LIMIT 0, 100' at line 1
I know nothing about this site, but I went on a cruise with some friends several years back. The cruise itself was, by far, the least expensive part of the entire trip. Flying to Miami was probably the greatest expense.
If you do the cruise the way the cruise company wants you to, you'll be blowing money in the casino and (especially) on alcohol. The group I was with was composed of particularly ingenious tightwads, so we found out exactly how much water you're allowed to bring (2L per person, or something similar), bought appropriate water bottles, filled them with vodka from Costco, and each took our allowed bottle of wine.
In general, I found the whole thing to be fairly dull, since I don't care for gambling or hanging out at the pool, but it was relaxing, and a great way to get a quick view of several areas in a short time. In my case, we hit Key West, somewhere else I forget, and Cozumel.
Plus the boat takes you around to different ports. There are "at sea" days and days when you arrive somewhere, get off the ship, walk around, return that evening.
Personally it can be tiring and a typical cruise might have 4 days where you arrive in different places and 3 days when you are just sailing. Some people would like to be in a different place every day. Some people prefer more at sea days. But no big deal it's still nice (you don't have to get off the ship but you sort of feel you should or you would miss something).
The only added expense would be for liquor typically on some cruise lines and almost always what is known as "shore excursions". Like if you wanted to snorkle, rent a jetski or something like that.
As long as the weather is good and the cruise line isn't bottom end it's a good experience I've found.
The inside cabins are the cheapest it gets more expensive if you want a veranda (balcony) or ourside (with a porthole) but the inside cabins are ok.
After all you don't spend much time in the cabin you are on the ship at the pool or the rock climbing wall etc and you get to take advantage of the same things that anyone can. Other added expenses might be internet access or if you want to eat in a fancy restaurant one night (you don't have to the "regular" food is quite good. And it's always available (you can get food at any hour and it's typically free at least on any cruise I have been on).
Since you had no idea you might want to take a cruise, blog about it, and maybe you can figure out a way to help the cruise lines with marketing toward the age group that has never cruised. (I'm serious about that it could be a business opportunity..)
Well, there's more besides the 'rooms are 2p'. It doesn't include food for example... You have to buy that, and it can be pretty expensive because the restaurants on the boat have a monopoly. The other thing is that cruise ships usually have mandatory gratuities that can be pretty expensive.
No. Every US based cruise I've ever been on or heard about has free meals. Its common to hear people talk about gaining 10 lbs on a cruise because they ate so much.
Yes. At the sit down dinners I often couldn't decide on an entree -- so I would just order both.
Drinks (including soda, coffee, and of course alcohol) are very much not free though. You are also not allowed to bring any alcohol on board.
Some cruises have begun charging "charging extra for new premium amenities such as fancy alternative restaurants" [1] -- but the run of the mill buffets are all you can eat and free.
Is there a way to line these up so you can get back to your starting destination fairly easily? If we could line them up back to back I'd love to do this for like 6 months, I think.
I'm the creator of this site... I tried some algorithms to build something like this. The problem is that there are peak seasons that make the price crazy expensive. To be on contiguous ships all year, the best price seemed to be around $30k... if you don't care that the ports line up (which probably makes it impossible to actually do) it was around $20k.
Cool site! I am just curious, where do you get the data from? Is it scraping? I've had a few ideas for cruise-related sites, but have been consistently stifled by the lack of affordable data about cruise itineraries.
Keep in mind that internet access can be slow and sometimes out of reach of the Satellite. Other than that it's a great idea and there have been tech cruises.
This is really nice, I just found an awesome deal! Too bad the listed cruises are only for United Statians, and I couldn't book a cruise when I clicked on the link, because they only accept bookings from United Statians. Fixed it by just visiting the website of Holland America Line, from there I can book it. But it would be much nicer if I could just purchase it from your link. I assume you'd also get a commission for it.
It would also be nice of there would be some pictures of the cruise or the cruise ship. Anyway, bookmarked this, will come in handy :)
This site was linked from that post, which is probably where kirubakaran found it. I'm not sure why you think he's making money for sharing Tynan's link. Are you suggesting that, while submitting links to HN is free, he paid off two different people to submit the blog post and the link to Cruise Sheet separately? Why?
Because it's such a maddeningly blatant shill post which, out of context, would be considered the worst type of spam: a single link to a "Find hidden hot cruise deals" site.
And in the context of the post it's not much better. You know where I like to work? From the deck of a cruise ship! No shit, I'd love to be on a cruise ship too.
"You know where I like to code? From the beaches of Aruba!" Followed up by a link to an Aruba travel deals site. No.
Extended rant: my frustration equally applies to Tynan's post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6697416 - nothing personal per se, save for the obviousness of the article I ham-handedly parodied above.
These class of ex post facto blog posts authored solely for self promotion seem like the bread and butter of HN. He build a website to sell cruise ship deals and now he _really_ wants everyone to know how great it is to [insert relevant occupation] from the deck of a cruise ship.
I really need to start thinking of HN as "Hustler News" instead of "Hacker News" I think it'd alleviate the cognitive dissonance I got going on.
1. I saw the link on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6697416 where plainOldText was kind enough to post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6698086
2. I thought, well, more people need to see this awesome app, so let me post the link as a story.
The only profit I got was in karma points. I checked xe.com and it says 1.000 HN = 0.000 USD.
(ps: Thanks dangrossman, plainOldText and bradly)