Adding a Disney Cruise to your Orlando Vacation.

Considering adding a cruise to your Orlando/Kissimmee vacation, but not sure where to start? This is the article for you. This article discusses how to add a Disney Cruise or other cruise line cruise, that depart from Port Canaveral, Tampa Bay and Port Everglades, to your Disney vacation in Orlando, Florida.

Disney Cruises

Disney Wonder in Alaska.

Disney Cruises depart from 2 locations in Florida, Port Canaveral and Port Everglades at Fort Lauderdale. Port Canaveral is much closer to Orlando and the Florida Disney resorts. Disney cruise itineraries are very similar to other cruise lines, offering 3 and 4 night cruises to the Bahamas, 5 to 7 night cruises to the Eastern and Western Caribbean, and 10 night cruises to the Southern Caribbean. All of Disney's cruises out of Florida include a stop at Disney's private island, Castaway Cay.

Disney does not offer any incentives to book a combined cruise with a stay at a Disney resort. Disney has discontinued their free bus transportation, the Magical Express, to and from the Orlando airport and any of their resort hotels in Orlando. They also discontinued the Magical Express between their cruise line terminal at Port Canaveral and their Orlando resorts. You will now need to organize and pay for your own transportation. 

Below is a short 6 minute video from one of our favorite Disney YouTube channels, The Disney Food Blog offering their top 5 food and dining secrets. The video is actually from 2018, but is still very relevant today.

Port Canaveral Transportation

If you are staying at one of our villas you will most likely have a car. If this is the case, you have 2 options:

1. Drive yourself to Port Canaveral, park the car there while you cruise and drive yourself back to the airport or to one of our villas depending on whether you do the cruise first or last during your trip.
2. Use some type of airport transportation to get between Port Canaveral and the airport and only rent a car for the time you are actually in the Orlando area. This means that you will either rent your car at the airport and drop it off at the cruise terminal or do the reverse.

Here's a great article comparing different several different transportation options: 6 Best Ways to Get to Disney Cruises in Port Canaveral.

Our Disney Cruise

Sail away deck party.

We've done two Disney cruises: a 7 night inside passage cruise in Alaska and a 3 night cruise in the Bahamas, which is the one I'll discuss here. We splurged on this trip, booking a 4 night stay at one of Disney's Animal Kingdom lodges and a 3 night cruise to the Bahamas. At this time, Disney was still operating the Magical Express so, once we finished our stay at Animal Kingdom Lodge, we took the Magical Express bus to Port Canaveral. After embarkation, checking out our cabin, and mandatory life boat drills, we made our way up to the pool deck and participated in the sail away party. As you can see in the picture it had just rained and was a bit wet, but still was a lot of fun.

Pirate deck party.

The next morning we found ourselves in the Bahamas. We had booked a shore excursion to the Atlantis Resort Water Park, but just as we arrived at the Atlantis Resort it started to rain. Fortunately, Atlantis has an indoor museum/aquarium that we spent the morning exploring and, once we were ready for lunch and some water park time, the rain had stopped. This water park is not like any of the water parks around Orlando. It is huge, covering 141 acres with over 20 swimming areas, lots of water slides, and an amazingly long lazy river with a very exciting rapids section! When we returned to the ship we donned our pirate costumes and headed up to the pool deck for the pirate deck party.

Our cabana on Castaway Cay.

Our last day was spent leisurely lounging in a wonderful cabana on Disney's private island, Castaway Cay. You could borrow snorkeling gear and explore the artificial reefs and ship wrecks that Disney had put into the lagoon, but since it was early April, the water proved too cold for any of us snorkel. Instead, we relaxed in the cabana's hammocks as the kids played in the sand and a warmer, shallow tide pool.

We really enjoyed this cruise. The only thing we felt could have been improved would have been more time to explore the ship. You really don't have much time to spend time on the ship when doing a 3 or 4 night cruise and I would go for a 4 to 5 night cruise if I had to do it over. Otherwise, it was fantastic.

Other Cruise Line Options

Disney cruises also offer the following:

• Disney character meet-n-greets,
• Disney movies on the pool deck,
• Disney shows in the theater,
• Disney themed dining rooms and
• Disney themed ships.

As you can see, everything is very Disney, which may be exactly what you're looking for. However, their cruises are priced near the high end of the main stream cruise lines comparable with Princess, Celebrity, and Holland America.  As they don't offer any incentives when combining a stay at a Disney resort with a cruise, if you want to escape the Disney bubble while saving money, check out some other cruise lines.

I'm only going to recommend cruise lines that either depart from Port Canaveral or Tampa Bay because these are the two most convenient ports to get to from Orlando as they are both within a 2 hour drive. This rules out Princess and Holland America. Here's a list in order of most expensive to least expensive:

• Disney Cruise Line - Departures from Port Canaveral only. All Disney all the time.
• Celebrity Cruises - Departures from Tampa Bay only. This cruise line is the most up scale on this list, but may not have as many activities for kids.
• Royal Caribbean - Departures from both Port Canaveral and Tampa Bay. This cruise line has some of the largest cruise ships on the sea so if you're looking for a floating city this one's for you. Of course, the larger the ship, the more activities there will be to do on board.
• Norwegian Cruise Line - Departures from both Port Canaveral and Tampa Bay. Norwegian is in the same category as Royal Caribbean, but has somewhat smaller ships (they are still very large).
• Carnival Cruises - Departures from both Port Canaveral and Tampa Bay. Carnival used to be known as the party ships for young single people, but have rebranded themselves over the last several years as more family friendly fun ships that won't break the bank.
• MSC Cruises - Departures from Port Canaveral only. MSC is in the same category as Carnival.

Discovery Princess in Alaska.

All of these cruise lines offer similar itineraries for the Bahamas and Caribbean and most, if not all, have a private island at which they may stop. They also all offer kids clubs, shore excursions and on board activities. We've cruised on Cunard, Celebrity, Disney, and Princess and we've always had great service, good food, and clean cabins. If you're interested in doing a cruise, but haven't tried one yet, you really can't go wrong with any of these cruise lines.

Although it may seem that there are many cruise line companies around, what looks like a lot of separate cruise lines are actually just different brands owned by a smaller number of companies. For example: Royal Caribbean (NYSE: RCL) owns Royal Caribbean, Celebrity and Silversea cruise lines; Norwegian (NYSE: NCLH) owns Norwegian, Oceania and Regent Seven Seas Cruise Lines; Carnival Corp.(NYSE: CCL) owns Carnival, P&O, Costa, AIDA, Princess, Holland America, Cunard and Seabourn cruise lines.  Royal Caribbean and Celebrity are actually owned by the same company. The Royal Caribbean brand, with its' large ships and moderate price point, caters more towards families while Celebrity with its' higher price point caters more towards couples.

General Tips

• When booking a cruise always check that the ship will meet your expectations. The larger the ship, the more on board activities, but the less it will feel like a ship.
• If you can, book at least a 4 or 5 night cruise. We did a 3 night Disney cruise when our kids were young and it was great, however we felt like we didn't have enough time to fully experience the ship because the cruise was so short.
• If you plan on doing any shore excursions provided by the cruise line, book them early as they tend to book up fast. You don't have to use the cruise line for shore excursions as you can always book with other tour operators in advance or when you arrive at each port.  Not booking anything in advance means you are taking a chance that the activity you want to do is not available from anyone.  One benefit to booking a shore excursion via the cruise line is that if your group is late getting back from the excursion, the Ship WILL wait for you!  If you booked locally, and your excursion is late getting back....Anchors Away!