Squeezing an SUV into a VW Beetle or How to Get What You Pack into Your Stateroom

How small is a cruise ship stateroom?

Well, the average U.S. hotel room is 300 square feet.¹

College dorm room? Around 180.²

And the ship stateroom? Sadly, about 175.¹

Smaller than a dorm room.

When you consider how much you’re going to pack into that room—play clothes, formal clothes, travel clothes, electronics, and so on—you can’t help but wonder, how is that going to work?

Luckily, the cruise lines have managed to work a fair amount of storage space into that bite-sized room that’s going to be your floating home for a week. Some ships have more than others, but here are some tips for finding a spot for all that you’ve got:

Off the door and into the closet. Carnival recently made waves with some restrictions on over-the-door shoe organizers. You can get around this by bringing the kind that fit inside the closet (it has hooks on the top that hang from the bar). Yeah, it eats into your space for hanging clothes, but you’d be surprised how much extra storage this adds. Three of these (one for clothing and two for shoes/knickknacks) fit very comfortably in Princess’ large closets and even (though snugly) in the smaller Royal Caribbean ones.

This organizer is perfect for shirts and
underwear and folds into a compact package
for your suitcase. Get it at
Target or Walmart.

Look under the bed. There’s a lot of space down there. When closet and drawer space is tight, consider keeping half of your clothes in your suitcases stored under the bed. About midway through the trip, I do a swap—take the clean clothes out of the suitcase and onto the shelves, and store the dirty ones back under the bed.

Climbing the walls. You don’t need to take up space on your night table—your walls function as a note-holding device. Just throw a few magnets in your suitcase before leaving home.

Bare the frig. On embarkation day, ask your room steward to take all those high-priced drinks and snacks that you won’t touch out of the frig, and use it for the wine or water you bring, or snacks from the buffet. Some cruise lines are now just providing an empty frig.

Safe and sound. Don’t forget about the safe—in addition to wallets, keys and jewelry, it’s also a great place to store smartphones, smaller tablets and anything else you’re not likely to use as you cruise.

Pack your smarts. If you’re flying to the cruise, you’ve got built-in over-packing protection—it’s called baggage cost. But if you’re driving to the port, there’s nothing stopping you from stuffing your bags—except self-control. What’s worked for me—uh, sort of—is to pack, and then repack, saying over and over in my head, “am I really going to wear this?” I pull out a few things…and then still take too much.

¹nbcnews.com

²WSJ, 8/12

The Cure for Deck Plan Distress

Well, maybe I’m exaggerating the agony of trying to select a stateroom with those microscopic cruise catalog deck plans…or am I?
 
If you’re like me, you’ve pained and strained to read those numbers that seem to get smaller every year. We’ve done a Sherlock and wielded a magnifying glass. Stacked as many eyeglasses as our noses would hold. Held the catalogs up to the light and pushed them as far out as our arms could go.
 
The good news is that after the all the eye strain, the migraine and a dose of research, I now have a few decent suggestions for dealing with deck plans for picking that perfect stateroom:
 
1.      Blow it up. We’ve taken a page from the catalog, enlarged on the copier and then did it again and again until it got legible. Then, we mounted it on foam core.
 
2.      Look it up. Here are some websites that are a real help:

cruisedeckplans.com –Perhaps the best of the sites, it promises to “make cruise deck plans fun.” It certainly has a lot of neat features, which enable you to:

·        View a number of decks on one page, convert it to PDF for printing, and make the display larger or smaller (select “Deck Plans” from top menu)

·        Drag decks over each other to see what’s above and below (select “Drag Decks” from top menu)

·        Hover over a cabin to get a diagram and general square footage for a category

·        Where you see a photo icon on the deck, see actual photos of the area on the ship

·        Be alerted to possible issues in a deck area, such as “This blank space is a crew area and you may hear doors opening and other noise coming from this area” (a star on the deck plan indicates a comment)

 

And if you join for $8.99 a year, you get actual photos of rooms submitted by readers, as well as downloadable photos of public areas. There were quite a lot of photos, which makes the reasonable fee well worth the cost. 

In fact, they’ll even pay you—if you submit your own photos ($.25 each).

icruise.com—A great feature of this site is that you can plug in a room number and it takes you right to it on the deck plan, flagged by a can’t-miss-it flashing square. To use this feature, from the homepage, select “Cruise Lines,” then your ship and “Deck Plans” from the left menu. Enter your room number in the “Find Your Cabin” search. Be sure to include the letter with the room number when searching (e.g., D415) or it won’t work. 

Also, the deck plans are oversized and clear, and can be enlarged or reduced. If you select the “Public Rooms” tab (in the middle of the screen), it will show if there are any public rooms on that deck.

deckplangenius.com—This site claims advice on 83,000 staterooms. From the top menu, select “Cruise Ships,” your ship and then scroll down the page to select a deck. The deck plans are easy to read, but not enlargeable. Click on a room to get info about it, and pros and cons of the location. However, this info is very general in nature.

For example, the first room we chose, in a bump out, said, “At this time, there have been no extraordinary issues identified with this cabin. However, that does not mean that there are not possible issues with this cabin.” 

And the caption under the stateroom photo said: “It is not the actual picture of the stateroom, but should be quite similar to the actual cabin.” In fact, we’ve stayed in a mini-suite on the same Princess ship and this was not an accurate representation.

Some detailed reviews on specific rooms have been submitted by readers, which can be very useful, because they comment on everything from noise level to condition of the room. Unfortunately, there’s a limited number of reviews; for the Caribbean Princess, for example, there were only four.

cruiseshiprooms.com—Deck plans on this site are also easy to read, but, again, can’t be magnified. If you click on a room, you get just general info.  It provides an area for reviews and photos, but none was available for a room on either of two ships I searched.

 
3.      Give it up. The easiest way to pick a cabin, of course, is to let your travel agent do it. Or, select a “guarantee” room, which will save you some money, but you could end up with a room anywhere—including next to the laundromat.
 
Musing’s Top Tip: Other helpful resources for trip planning are cruise reviews—by folks like you and me who actually took the trips on the ships you’re considering. Check out this posting for some of the best cruiser review sites.