Cruising’s Biggest Bargain: The Repositioning Cruise
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If you have time to take a cruise of 14 or more days, enjoy spending several days at sea rather than visiting ports every day and are looking for a great holiday deal, a repositioning cruise could be perfect for you.
Because many ships move around the world to sail summer seasons in different regions and hemispheres, they have to reposition as one summer ends and another begins. A repositioning cruise is a one-way journey from one country or continent to another, which means the ships are harder to fill – so fares are often cheaper than for regular cruises.
However, bear in mind that you have to organise flights to and from the start and end ports of a repositioning cruise. For example, Royal Caribbean International’s Voyager of the Seas is sailing from Singapore to Sydney on October 22, so while the fare is extremely good value you’d need to factor in the cost of a flight from Australia to Singapore.
Fly/cruise packages are readily available and cruises.com.au works with a number of airlines to provide competitive airfares. This 14-night cruise includes nine days at sea as well as visits to Port Klang (Malaysia), Darwin, Airlie Beach and Brisbane – plenty of time to explore the multitude of facilities on board the 3114-passenger ship. You could even master the art of surfing on the FlowRider just in time for summer Down Under.
The key to finding repositioning cruises is to look at the regions that have a specific cruise season. So when autumn starts in the Mediterranean (usually October), ships that have spent the summer there start heading across the Atlantic for summer in the Caribbean; and when European spring comes around again in March and April, they return to the Med. Most of the major cruise lines send ships backwards and forwards on this transatlantic route every year.
Ships sail seasonally between North and South America and the Caribbean; and from the Caribbean to Alaska for the April-to-September season, then back to the sun again. Routes may be along the California coast to Hawaii or via the Panama Canal. And as more cruise lines send ships to India, Asia and Australasia, an increasingly popular repositioning route is from Europe, through the Suez Canal and the Red Sea, at the end of summer in the Mediterranean.
Cruise lines that are moving ships from America to Australia on the transpacific route for the 2015-16 season include Celebrity Cruises, Holland America Line and Princess Cruises. Most ships sail in October from Honolulu, Vancouver or a Californian port, to Australia’s east coast. Celebrity Solstice is departing Honolulu on October 2 on an 18-night voyage to Sydney, visiting Lahaina (Maui), Papeete, Bora Bora and Moorea in French Polynesia, and Auckland and the Bay of Islands in New Zealand on the way. That means you can take advantage of 12 sea days to check out the extensive range of onboard CelebrityLife activities – classes and workshops are divided into “Taste”, “Learn”, “Revive” and “Play” – as well as joining shore excursions at some fascinating ports of call.
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