Chapter 3: Planning Your Cruise - Excerpt
What Should I Bring?
Clothes
A cruise is similar to a resort vacation. You will want to bring clothes appropriate for the weather (you can research weather patterns on weather.com and weather.yahoo.com and in travel books), and include something in case of rain/cold. In the daytime onboard ship, passengers tend to dress in comfortable, classic clothes. Leave the jeans and ripped t-shirts at home. Cotton shorts and tops, sundresses, Dockers-style pants, polo shirts, and button shirts are all appropriate. Sandals, loafers and other casual shoes are fine, and if you want to use the gym facilities, you will need appropriate workout wear (shorts and t-shirts are fine here).
Sample Princess fitness schedule
If you want to go swimming, bring your bathing suit (I would recommend two, so that you have a wet suit, and a dry suit, at all times) as well as a cover-up of some sort, to wear between your stateroom and the pool. You will also need a cover-up and shoes/sandals, if you want to eat in the buffet area: bathing suits alone are only appropriate at the immediate pool areas.
Outdoor pool on Royal Caribbean’s Vision of the Seas
All-ages pool on Disney Wonder
Adults-only pool on Disney Wonder
Some ships have formal nights, in the evenings. The level of dress, and participation, varies between cruise lines, and even itineraries. Generally speaking, Norwegian and Disney have the lowest level of participation in formal nights, Royal Caribbean and Carnival have slightly more participation, Princess has medium participation, and Celebrity and Holland America have high participation. More luxurious lines (such as Cunard and Crystal) have almost 100% participation in formal nights. Caribbean and Mexican cruises tend to have the lowest levels of formal night participation, while more exotic cruises (such as Europe) have higher participation. Another factor is your dining setup. Traditional dining attracts more ‘traditional’ cruisers, who tend to be dressier (as a group), whereas ‘alternative’ dining tends to be less formal. If you compare this to the lines that offer alternative versus traditional dining, you’ll see that the people who don’t like to dress up as much, head to certain cruise lines, while those who love to get formal, go to others.
So what does it mean, to participate in formal night? It means that if you want to eat in the main dining room at dinnertime, you dress up and take extra care with your appearance. Some people wear tuxes and formal gowns (if you like to dress up this is one of the few times you get a chance to dress to the nines), while others wear suits and nice dresses (like you’d wear to a fancy restaurant to home: you don’t have to buy anything new, if you don’t want to).
But what if dressing up isn’t your thing? If you choose not to participate in formal night on a line that has medium to high participation then it is requested that you dine in the alternative dining (usually a sit-down service at the buffet area) so as not to change the atmosphere in the main dining room. On cruise lines with low formal night participation (such as Norwegian) this is not an issue and informally dressed passengers are not uncommon even in the main dining room.
On more formal cruise lines, passengers stay formally dressed all night. On less formal lines, you will see a number of passengers who dress for dinner, and then go back to their cabins to change, before the evening show.
However, even on the most casual of nights, jeans and shorts are not acceptable in the main dining room (nice shorts are okay for breakfast and lunch in the main dining room), except perhaps on young children.