Why Book a Virgin Voyages Cruise
It’s no secret we love cruising as a vacation option. We are in our 30s and have been on 3 cruises across two cruise lines as of this writing. However, our most notable and favorite cruise by far is with Virgin Voyages.
Cruising is a newer travel option for us. Cruising is convenient since you feel at home while also visiting new countries and destinations at the same time. You won’t need to unpack or worry about food options. How easy would it be if you were to wake up in a new port almost every single day?
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In case you need help with planning for certain locations or want to know more about a certain ship:
Virgin Voyages is a new kid on the block on the cruising scene. Their business model is a bit different than their competitors. Most things are included in the cruise fare except for shore excursions, souvenirs, fresh juices, and alcohol.
That means gratuities, specialty dining, sodas, and WiFi are included when you book. These are upsold as additional fees when cruising with other non-luxury cruise lines and we figured: WHY NOT?
It could be, but not by much compared to some of the bigger lines. For example, a good deal on Carnival, NCL, or Royal Caribbean should be less than $100 per person a night. That amount should include the base fare, taxes, fees, and daily gratuities for the staff.
Living in Florida has its perks – if we see fares around the $100 level per day (pre-covid, at least), it is easier to book and go. We can drive to the ports in Tampa, Port Canaveral, Fort Lauderdale or Miami from any of our two bases.
Here, we discuss the different room options you can book in Virgin Voyages, from the Sea Terrace, the Indoor, and the Sea View. No suite reviews (for now) though – we just don’t think we can get ourselves to pay the price for it!
For our trip, a sea view room cost us $1,920 for 5 nights for two people. That includes the taxes and fees, so it averages around $192 per person per night. It is about the same amount as a Disney Cruise Line fare with the Florida resident discount.
Your fare may be different from ours considering we booked early and had additional discounts stacked because of the pandemic.
The insider room for two is around $100 cheaper at the time of our booking, so it made more sense to upgrade to the sea view. This is around $1,870 for two.
If you are on a Caribbean cruise then this is the most budget friendly way to go. You get all the perks that people in the sea view and sea terrace have on the ship with the exception of not having natural light in the room.
Inside rooms are not advisable when sailing other ports like Alaska or Northern Europe. There’s just too much to see that a balcony is a huge plus! Then you won’t need to jostle for space with other folks on the outside deck.
Having a balcony also means convenience. If going to a colder place like Alaska, you can go in and out of your balcony and quickly warm up.
Once you have sailed with the cruise line before, you can book your next cruise onboard to stack discounts. Our next cruise with Virgin cost us $1,650 including taxes and fees for two people in a sea terrace room. That is an average of $165 per person a night. Not too bad.
Booking the next cruise onboard means you can save more by stacking discounts that they offer. When we booked, there was an additional 20% off the cruise, an extra $300 for booking a terrace, and $300 for our Seablazer program. YMMV depending on what they offer when you book onboard.
Aside from the sea view having a big porthole where you can look out and see the sun and the ocean, the layout of the room is the same.
You get a small closet space, an ensuite bathroom, a bed that can convert to a couch, a mini fridge and a table and chair. There is even a mobile table to put near the bed in case you want to work or eat by the couch or bedside.
Personally, once we booked sea views, we thought it would be hard to go back to the indoor room. If you’re in your room only to sleep and prefer to stay in the lounge areas or do activities during sea days, then the inside room is great. You save money, which you can then use for activities or your next cruise! Otherwise, if you value looking outside and seeing the sun and the sea, then the sea view may be for you.
Simply put: it’s a new ship and company. The Scarlet Lady feels hip, and smaller than other cruises, and 18+! Virgin is probably the first cruise line that implemented an 18+ minimum (correct me if I’m wrong though).
We have been on other cruise lines before: Royal Caribbean’s Majesty of the Seas to the Bahamas, and Rhapsody of the Seas to the Western Caribbean. Then we took an Alaska cruise by Holland America on the Noordam. We are no noobs to cruising, we know what to expect at the basic level.
Leaving our kid behind with grandma is a bit scary. In the end, having a break from the baby is refreshing. We thought that we had the best sleep in over 2 years during the time we cruised!
Honestly, we were also quite lucky. We managed to cruise before a new variant swept the world with this pandemic. It was all good. Everybody was negative on the cruise when we went, and never got sick at all during the trip!
The cruise we originally booked was called Dominican Daze. It is a 5-night cruise leaving Miami and docking at Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic as well as the Beach Club at Bimini. We have not been to either locations so that was a plus and hence why we chose this cruise.
The price was a bit high for a 5-night cruise: it was $1,870 for two people for an interior room, an average of almost $200 per person per night. Our Rhapsody of the Seas cruise cost half the price of this!
Our cruise originally had a guest DJ playing in Bimini – Sofi Tukker. Enter the pandemic: no more DJs onboard. Oh well.
A few weeks before we were set to go on the cruise, we found out our itinerary had been changed. The port at Puerto Plata was delayed in their refurbishment and we can’t dock in the Dominican Republic! Enter a new port: Costa Maya.
Traveling during the pandemic, you really have to be open to changes in itineraries and times. It’s one of those things we’ve gotten used to.
We have been to Costa Maya before (also known as Mahahual, Mexico). We decided to still do it anyway since we’re still going to Bimini and the cruise line we’re going with is also new.
If you have a full time job (like we do), you also have to factor in vacation days. We have already filed for these days off and getting a few days off in December can be pretty tough. Everybody wants to take a vacation day off – it’s the holidays, duh.
Upon checking what else to do in Mahahual/Costa Maya, it turns out there were more Mayan Ruins and other activities we could do. This is one of those cruise ports that you can go back again and again and not be bored.
We booked a tour with The Native Choice. They were our guides for our Chacchoben tour during our Rhapsody of the Seas cruise. This time we booked a Kohunlich tour, 2 hours away by car. Not sponsored, by the way.
We’ll talk more about the shore excursion we booked in another post, as well as the port in detail. The 5 night cruise stopped in Costa Maya and in Beach Club in Bimini.
Since we are frugal folk and like to go on as many vacations as we can (paid time off permitting), we want to use our credit card points to at least cover the cost of the cruise. This means going to use a cash back card to cover the whole $1,950 bill.
I used the Bank of America Travel Rewards Card to pay for the $340 down payment for the cruise and already used our points partially to reimburse myself the cost.
The BoA travel rewards card gives me 1.65x per $1 spent (since I have a banking relationship with BoA) and you can reimburse yourself using points up to a year of when the transaction happened in your credit card.
This means that if I booked a cruise on Feb 20, 2022, I would have until Feb 20, 2023 (or a few days before that) to reimburse myself the cost of that travel by statement credits. This is better than Barclaycard Arrival’s 3 month reimbursement period.
Alternatively, one can also use the Fidelity Cash Credit card and Citi Double Cash card. They earn 2 points for every $1 spend, so one can earn twice as many points in the same amount of time as other cards.
Our main reason for using a cash back card for this cruise was because I’m not even sure if I can book Virgin Voyages using the other transferable points programs. We surely won’t use our Ultimate Rewards points since we are earmarking these points for either a trip back to Europe, Asia, or the Caribbean, or for Hyatt hotel stays.
If anybody knows if Virgin Voyages can be booked using Citi Thank You points or if you know of any other ‘travel hack’ for cruises then please let me know in the comments below! 😁 Cruising is one of those areas that don’t have widespread travel hacking techniques that I’ve learned yet!
One thing we got when we first booked our Virgin Voyages cruise as a bonus was Sailor Loot. What is sailor loot? It is the equivalent of onboard credit, which you can use for alcohol, souvenirs, and even shore excursions. However, unlike other cruise companies, the Virgin sailor loot can only be used onboard. I could be wrong, but that’s our experience.
We wanted to use our sailor loot for the Sapona Shipwreck and Shark snorkelling tour, but if we booked it on the phone before the cruise, we would have to pay using a credit card and we can’t really get to use the loot. At first, we wanted to see what we could spend onboard that could amount to our loot of $150, but no amount of items we buy is worth as much as an experience!
The bar tab is different where it could (theoretically) only be used for alcoholic drinks or specialty drinks like fresh juices and cappuccinos/teas onboard or at the beach club. However, there were reports that some bar tab money can be used as sailor loot. Not sure if it was just a system bug and is corrected by now, but that’s amazing value.
As seablazers, we automatically get $125 in extra money once we load $400 on our bar tab for every Virgin Voyage cruise. Imagine if that bar tab money can be used to book shore excursions, then that is an extra $125 to use on higher end trips or souvenirs to bring home!
So that’s the main difference. A bar tab is only available for specialty drinks like alcohol and fresh juices or bar coffee, and the sailor loot can be used for anything you book onboard – alcohol, tours, souvenirs, and the like.
It does cater to a more upscale market, with better options and free WiFi that’s good enough to send and receive emails as well as basic document processing – we were able to type a few blog posts on a Chromebook using the basic internet alone!
Given the benefits that we mentioned above, here’s our summarized reason on why we would book a Virgin Voyages cruise:
We hope this article helped convince you to book your next trip on Virgin Voyages, and who knows, we may see you on board! Our next sailing is for Dominican Daze for December 2022. Click on this link to book the exact same cruise as ours and you may get a discount as well!
This is a part of our cruise series on the blog. Click on the links below for more related cruising articles:
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