Budgeting for Alaska

Last night I spent 2.5 hours cleaning our place up because my sister is coming today. Not that she’d really care. The last time she came to visit, I did a half-assed job, and she thought my place was really nice anyway. Or maybe she was just trying to be polite. :) Anyway, it’s going to be a good time.

I still owe her like $330 CDN for when she bought $300 worth of US money for me. I need to remember to go to the bank sometime this weekend.

So all in all I have about $325 US to spend. And that will be my budget for the Alaskan cruise. We have 6 full days of cruising. All of our food is paid for, and neither of us are big partiers or drinkers. My aunt (who is a travel agent and has done the Alaskan cruise like 15 times) said that you can buy a bottle of something at the duty free shop for way cheaper than at the bar, and mix your own drinks in your cabin. I wouldn’t have thought of that, so I’m glad she told me.

We also have looked at the land excursions and have decided on one for each of the 2 major stops. Both are under $50 each – but my aunt said that if you book through the tour company that does them instead of through the boat, you can usually save b/c the cruise marks up the excursions so that at least they’re making money off of them.

The only thing that I think might blow our budget is the spa. We’re really into going to the spa while we’re on board. My aunt said it’s ridiculously expensive … so what we might do is when we’re docked in my hometown (that’s one of our stops, kind of lame), we could book ourselves into a spa downtown. Which would be much cheaper than on the boat.

Anyway, those are just ideas that I had to save money on the cruise. If I’m able to stick to my spending budget, that means the cruise will have cost me $1,100 approximately. That’s for one week – everything included. Not bad. About the same price as a 1 week trip to Mexico or something.

I know we could have gotten the cruise cheaper if we had waited (another family member just came back from a 1-week Alaskan cruise last month and only paid $600-something with all fees and taxes in). But unfortunately I need to book vacation well in advance, and we wanted to make sure we got the exact dates that we wanted. It ends up working well for me because of the timing in Seattle – since BF is meeting me the day after I dock for a ball game.

Here’s how the costs all broke down (per person):

$459 Cruise fare
$220 Port tax
$123 Government fees
$330 spending money
TOTAL = $1,132

P.S. I forgot to mention that we also get $50 each on-board credit! :) So my spending money will be more around $375 instead of $325.