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We're often asked, especially by those new to cruising, where to turn for reliable information about cruise ships, trends, destinations, money-saving tips and more. It's a pretty noisy space — travel agencies, cruise lines, cruise publications, podcasts, bloggers and others all chime in on a regular basis. So, who should you trust?
Cruiseable is a good place to start, with our cruise line overviews, ship reviews, travel guides, photo galleries, consumer journalism, blog coverage and user contributions. But we can't and don't cover everything in the cruise sector.
So here are 20 Essential Cruise Resources you should consult when planning or considering a cruise, including a few you may not have heard of (and excluding a few worthy blogs from the cruise lines). If you have your own favorites, please add them at the bottom — we plan to make this an annual guide!
Venerable CruiseCritic, now owned by TripAdvisor, has been around since 1995. As Wikipedia says: “Visited by over 5 million members per month, the site offers over 100,000 cruise reviews written by editors and members of the site, and information on more than 500 cruise ships and over 300 ports of call.” The site's looking long in the tooth these days, but there's still a lot of truth to be found in its boards and valuable tips in its articles and reviews.
If you're a serious cruise enthusiast, you should be reading Porthole Cruise Magazine, a slick, gorgeous and professionally produced independent publication devoted to cruise ship travel, holiday cruise destinations and cruise ship experiences. It comes out every other month. Porthole has a small editorial team and relies on a contingent of freelance travel writers. Founded in 1993 by publisher/editor-in-chief Bill Panoff, CEO of PPI Group, Porthole Cruise offers ship reviews, videos, cruise news and more. Porthole also has a website, though its content offerings there are more limited. Since 1998, the magazine has issued Reader's Choice Awards, surveying its readers to recognize outstanding cruise lines, ships, itineraries, ports of call,onboard amenities, hotels, shore excursions and more.
Since 2009, Cruise Radio has produced more than 350 podcasts that typically begin with a cruise news roundup followed by phone interviews with passengers who've recently taken cruises on a variety of mainstream cruise ships. Episodes also include occasional talks with industry insiders, cruise experts and port specialists. The podcast gets about 80,000 downloads a month — it's the one cruise podcast I listen to every week. Cruise Radio also features cruise news tidbits on its front page, but its bread and butter remain host and founder Doug Parker's fun, fast-paced, informative chats with cruisers.
What? A book? Yep. Berlitz Complete Guide to Cruising and Cruise Ships, first published in 1992, has long been the cruise industry bible, written and updated by UK-based Douglas Ward. Encyclopedic in nature, with a rigorous methodology — but lacking large photo galleries that a site and app like Cruiseable provides — the Berlitz Guide is all about providing the info readers need to pick the right cruise. The first part of the book helps you work out what you’re looking for in a cruise vacation and how to find it; Ward describes just about every aspect of life on board, including safety, what newbies can expect and how to save money. The bulk of the book is devoted to in-depth reviews of almost 300 ocean-going cruise ships, including food, service and entertainment. If you're planning a river cruise, also worth checking out is a sister book, Berlitz River Cruising in Europe.
USA Today is known for its soft news, and its travel and cruise sections are particularly strong, partly due to one of the best cruise journalists in the business, Gene Sloan, who pens the Cruise Log, which covers both breaking news and cruise trends. The USA Today cruise section offers consumer tips, ship reviews, cruise line overviews and its hallmark (if dated) photo galleries on existing and upcoming ships. When there's a new ocean ship debuting, you're likely to see Sloan among those an its maiden voyage or an early press trip.
Ralph Grizzle (a friend), the Avid Cruiser, has been on a mission for years to empower consumers to make informed cruise travel decisions by providing straight-up, thorough and well-written cruise reviews of hundreds of ships as well as interviews with cruise movers and shakers and deeper dives into the cruise experience. Along with colleague Aaron Saunders, Grizzle lives the life that many people only fantasize about: spending most of his time on cruise ships or in destinations that cruise ships touch. He's also an avid bicyclist, which informs his coverage of port destinations — helpful to those looking for to take advantage of not only sightseeing but also the recreational activities cruising has to offer. For those new to cruising, the Avid Cruiser's Cruise Blog is a good place to start. Of more recent vintage is a sister site, River Cruise Advisor. In recent years Grizzle has gravitated to coverage of luxury and river ships more than the mega-ships unleashed by the cruise lines.
Launched in 2009, All Things Cruise is the venerable cruise journalism arm of the Heidi Allison-Shane empire, which also includes the cruise deals/booking site CruiseCompete. Church and state is the byword here: An independent site not affiliated with any cruise line or travel agency, All Things Cruise is written by veteran travel writers without a need to curry favor with the cruise lines. You'll find writeups on cruise lines, destinations, ship reviews, cruise news and more. Experts offer advice on a wide range of subjects, ranging from finding the right cruise ship or shore excursions to basic questions about cruise wear or cell phone usage on board. An additional feature: a free e-card service that lets travelers email vital cruise line and ship contact information to family members and others prior to departure.
Fodor's, the venerable travel company, has several good offerings for cruisers looking to learn more about cruising, including a better than average Cruise Guide with cruise lines writeups, a cruise ship directory, a Cruising 101 set of resources and more. The content is far less comprehensive and story-driven than you'll find on a site like Cruiseable (compare Fodor's by-the-numbers Wind Surf review with Cruiseable's Wind Surf review), and you'll find far fewer photos as well, but Fodor's offers a good, wide-ranging, even-handed look at your options. Still, cruising is not just about what happens on the ship, and the Fodor's sweet spot lies elsewhere, in its series of 480 Fodor's travel guides and city guides, some of which have taken up space on my family room side table for years. Three especially useful guides are Fodor's The Complete Guide to Caribbean Cruises, Fodor's Caribbean and Fodor's Alaska. Most of us no longer like to lug guidebooks around to various destinations, and Fodor's accommodates, with digital versions made for the Web, tablet, smartphone and eReader.
Popular Cruising, from cruise enthusiast Jason Leppert, is more than just another cruise blog. The family-run operation does cover the usual laundry list of cruise topics, focusing on ocean cruising, river cruising, destinations and ship reviews ranging from Disney Dream and Anthem of the Seas to more off-the-beaten track cruise itineraries like Silver Discoverer's recent voyage to Micronesia and Melanesia. But the reason it ranks in our top 10 is that it's one of the few sites that offer well-produced cruise videos providing a polished look at a ship's highlights from bow to stern — you'll find several Popular Cruising videos embedded in the Cruiseable site and app. Good video is hard to pull off, and Leppert does it all in house. Impressive.
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Founded in Miami Beach by a team of cruise industry veterans, Onboard has been looking for some time to establish itself as “the go-to site for inspiring, planning and booking cruise travel.” Owned by Paris-based LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE, the site (there's no mobile app) has a small editorial team and offers news articles, features, photos, videos and traveler experiences covering a wide variety of cruise topics, itineraries and destinations. And, like Cruiseable, when you're ready to book, Onboard connects you with expert travel advisors to make it happen. The company also has a publishing and television arm, Onboard Media, producing onboard magazines and video programming for Carnival, Princess Cruises and Caesars.
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Travel Weekly, owned by Northstar Travel Media and based in Secaucus, NJ, is perhaps the most authoritative site (alongside USA Today) for cruise industry news and for coverage of the business of cruising. When a cruise line announces plans to build a new ship or open a new private island, you'll find it in its Cruise section. The site's evergreen content is solid as well, with overviews of the cruise lines — including many obscure ones ignored by most sites — organized in easy-to-navigate sections (luxury, premium, expedition, etc.) as well as breaking news, columns from industry veterans, ship capsules, guides to top ports and more. Travel Weekly puts on the annual CruiseWorld trade show in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., and it also offers one of the top lineups of enewsletters tailored to travelers looking for updates about Hawaii, Mexico, the Caribbean, luxury travel, river cruising — about 16 topics in all.
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ChrisCruises, from travel writer Chris Owen of Orlando, Fla., is one of the top-tier cruise blogs, offering first-person accounts of cruise getaways and news about the world of cruising. With a large following on Twitter at @OrlandoChris, Owen — a former travel agency owner — is a Certified Master Cruise Counselor by the Cruise Lines International Association. ChrisCruises could use an editor's eye, but the writing is earnest and the photography is top notch — Owen captures the essence of the subject wherever he travels to. The site was recently ranked one of the top 10 cruise blogs by the readers of USA Today.
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Cruise International is the UK’s leading newsstand travel magazine dedicated to cruise “holidays,” as they say across the pond. Filled with reviews, destination advice, interviews and ocean and river cruise news, the publication (which is a bit pricey for U.S. readers) helps both new and experienced cruisers plan their next trip, though I've noticed the number of new articles has fallen dramatically in the past year. The magazine, which also offers a tablet and smartphone version in addition to its website, is filled with beautiful photos, itinerary information, port guides, blog posts. A recent issue offered articles on cruising with kids in the Mediterranean, a review of the luxury river ship Scenic Jade on the Danube River and a city guide to Stockholm. Cruise International is perhaps best known for its annual Cruise Awards competition — which several Cruiseable team members have won, by the way.
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Islands magazine, published by Bonnier Corp., is an almost-monthly print magazine (10 issues a year) that rates a spot in our Top 20 on the strength of its destination journalism. You won't find articles about the latest cruise ships, but you will find plenty of great articles about intriguing things to do and see during a shore excursion, like its recent piece on the best snorkeling spots in St. John. Want to visit a plush island resort or find an out-of-the-way beach dive favored by the locals? Islands will give you the skinny. The magazine's ongoing series about islands to move to is the stuff daydreams are made of. The publication organizes an annual group cruise where fellow travelers get to meet editors and writers. Sadly, Islands is one of the few publications that doesn't provide access to its digital version on a tablet device if you already subscribe to its print product.
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A year or so ago I sat down with a top editor of AFAR magazine in its San Francisco offices and we held forth talking about new technologies, the ups and downs of travel publications, and the growing propensity for millennials to collect experiences instead of things. After all, AFAR has made experiential travel its calling card since its launch as a different kind of travel magazine in 2009. In the current issue of AFAR that I'm reading, in between penning this roundup, you'll find articles about solo traveling, a bartender's mixology secrets and a trip down Hong Kong's Hollywood Road. Nice. AFAR's website, including its destination guide photo galleries, is too cluttered and constrained for my tastes, but AFAR does a nice job with social media. The company also operates a nonprofit foundation providing scholarships for educational journeys for students. Kudos.
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I don't completely understand the business model of New York City-based CruiseLine.com — they have five travel agency partners — but I do know they have tens of thousands of cruise ship reviews from passengers as well as a wide assortment of feature articles like The Best Adult-Only Areas on Cruise Ships,The Best Caribbean Beaches for Cruisers and The 5 Best Cruises Without Kids. The site sports a wide-ranging cruise database, cruise deals, a community forum, expert advice and more.
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Whether you've heard of content marketing or not, it's coming to a website near you. The idea, in short, is to produce content that readers like and that will rank highly on Google. The latest example is Shermans Cruise, which was launched in December by ShermansTravel Media as a resource for people researching cruise lines, ships and itineraries, as well as those looking for cruise deals, insider tips, expert reviews and personalized content. Yes, a travel agency can produce high-quality editorial content (just as companies and brands have been doing).
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CruiseCal.com has a simple mission: to tell you where cruise ships are located at any given time, which comes in handy for getting a handle on which ports the ships are calling on. The site offers schedules for more than 200 cruise ships calling at thousands of cruise ports. A nice feature is the site telling you the weather at each destination (Cruiseable does this as well). Subscribers get access to calendars of the various ships and ports in calendar format, tools that let you search by port, ship, cruise line or date and a list of cruise ship webcams.
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Like CruiseCal, the main value that CruiseTimetables offers is the ability to see where scores of cruise ships are situated at any given time. Just scanning the site — did I mention its funky-retro design? — you'll get a feel for which ships hit the usual tourist-packed hotspots and which you'll find calling on ports like Valparaiso, Chile, Tianjin, China or Cape Town, South Africa. Look for up-to-date cruise ship schedules, itineraries, sample prices, ports of departure and ports of call for all the major cruise lines. The site also features popular shore excursions for cruisers visiting a port during a day trip.
Related resource: PortsAmerica has a dropdown menu that lets you see a calendar of when ships are scheduled to be in U.S. ports such as Los Angeles.
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Cruise Travel is one of two magazines devote to cruising in the U.S., and it offers cruise ship reviews and previews, destination writeups, a listing of cruise ships calling on ports and more. If you're an avid cruiser and can past the cranky letters to the editor, it's worth a look.
There are many other sites that offer valuable resources to readers. Here are a few that deserve a special mention:
What did we overlook? Sound off in the comments below.
