Cruise Deprivation and What to Do About It

We’re all reduced to arm chair travelers these days.

I don’t know about you, but I took comfort from the Sky Princess blazing “We will be back” in lights across the ship.

But in the meanwhile, how can we satisfy our insatiable appetite for cruising?

Well, here are a few suggestions:

Book it. Not the trip, your photos. Do something awfully old-fashioned—create a photo album. Yeah, having them on your cell phone is great. But seeing them in print, laid out in a slick coffee table book is even better. It’s cheap to put together and it will keep your mind off the vacation you didn’t have.

Stack the deck. Put your favorite photos onto a deck of cards, a mouse pad or luggage tag. Do what you never had time for. We had Shutterstock make up luggage tags with our faces on them. It would be hard for someone to take the wrong suitcase now.

See a disaster. Watch “Titanic” or “Poseidon Adventure.” Not something you’d want to do while you’re cruising. But now, while we’re all in dry dock, why not? Heck, you might even check out the YouTube videos on the sinking of the Concordia.

Root for Royal. And Carnival. They’ve been heroes, letting us off the hook while facing large losses.

Plan your next one. You know there will be a next one. Maybe not tomorrow or the next day, but at some point, your ship will sail again. And you want to make sure you’re on it.

Take Five: the Best Tools for Planning a Cruise

With the explosion of cruising has come an explosion of websites, blogs, books, videos and social media postings—it can really be overwhelming.

I’ve pulled out a few of what I consider among the best resources to read, hear and learn what you need to get the very best out of your cruise vacation:

Cruisecritic.com – This is the “Oasis class” of cruise planning sites, with tons of ship and port reviews, industry news and roll calls. Its forum is so robust that cruisers are posting just about every minute of every day.

There are specialty forums too, where like-minded folks congregate on topics ranging from “Lose Before You Cruise” (weight, not money) and “Cruise Foodies” to “Family Cruises” and “Solo Cruises.”

Cruise Radio – Not only does this site and its newsletter have useful and interesting articles, but it also features podcasts and YouTube videos.

Don’s Family Vacations – Don does video quite a lot on YouTube, giving it to you straight, from cruise tips to cruise trip-ups—and all done in a rather endearing way. He’s both informative and entertaining.

Cruise Control – Bill Panoff also does great videos—from ship reviews to special topics such as the newest technology on the high seas.

Cruisedeckplans.com – When it comes to picking your stateroom, this site is invaluable. Its

versatile functionality allows you to see several decks on one page, convert to PDF and print, bump up the size, and drag decks over each other to see what’s above and below.

If you hover over a room, you get a diagram and general square footage for a category. There are some actual photos of particular rooms and even a few comments of areas to steer clear of because of noise and other issues.

What’s your favorite cruise planning site? Share it here!