My first escape spreadsheet was born in 2018, when I started planning my first cruise with my husband for 2020 (which was delayed until 2021).
The first step of planning a cruise was picking a ship. I knew I wanted a 7 night cruise to the Western Caribbean in the last quarter of the year. I listed all of the ships with this offering along with the base price, and then listed all of the restaurants and activities on each ship so that I could compare them. While we were originally tempted by the lower price of the Empress in 2019, she was extremely lacking in onboard facilities and we ended up deciding to go with the Symphony of the Seas for November of 2020. It was really important to me that my husband enjoyed this trip so that we could keep cruising, and this gave us more time to save for the higher price tag.
Once we booked our cruise, we were able to access the cruise planner with all of the additional purchases we could make. The biggest choice – what excursions to take – deserved another sheet in the spreadsheet.
On this sheet I listed all of the excursions available through Royal Caribbean, along with the port they were in and the length of the tour. Using the descriptions, I placed each excursion into a category describing the type of activity – is it an active excursion, a visit to ruins, a food tour, etc. I also added columns to rank the activities, red for no interest, yellow for some interest, and green for high interest. We used YouTube videos and reviews to narrow down the winning green excursions until we were left with our final choices.
The next sheet I created was for tracking our cruise planner purchases. With Royal Caribbean, the prices in the cruise planner will change from one day to the next, and you can’t count on the percent off being accurate as the base price will also change. This meant we needed a quick way to tell if the price was better or worse than what we had previously purchased an item at – if the price went down enough, we cancelled and rebooked for the lower price.
The last sheet I made was for hotels. For cruises, it’s best practice to fly in the day before your cruise – you don’t want to miss your cruise because of flight delays. This meant we needed a hotel for the night before, so we made a list of all of the hotels I had access to with my reward points and compared their features.
