One thing I've noticed is that while local prices vary significantly from say, Scandinavia to SE Asia, the cost of cruising per day is much less affected. A week cruising costs only incrementally differently between the two regions. With that in mind, I tend to favor visiting overland in cheaper destinations and by cruise in the more expensive parts of the world. This presents the best value for your money.
Norway Fjords Cruise
Norway is an expensive destination. However, many of the best places are right along the coast and this makes cruising through the Fjords a great experience. In a country where a bottle of water costs $5, expenses add up fast. As far as I could tell, taking a cruise through the Fjords was actually the budget option compared to traveling overland and then having to take a boat out into the Fjord to see it. The trade off? You won't have the Fjords to yourself. In most of the Fjords we simply walked off the ship and explored the nature in the immediate vicinity. There was only one port where we had to go on an expensive ship tour because visiting those sights would have been unfeasible on our own.
Obviously, if you want to do multi-night treks, this won't be the ideal option for you, but it's a great option for a family where some people want to do day hikes and others just want to hangout on the ship and eat. We did this on Royal Caribbean and it was really good!
Baltic Capitals Cruise
Norway isn't the only expensive Scandinavian destination. Many cruise lines loop around the Baltic sea- hitting all the capitals and typically have an overnight stay in St Petersburg. Our Princess cruise sailed roundtrip from Copenhagen, including ports of call in:
Copenhagen, Denmark
Warnemünde, Germany- Gateway to Berlin (only if you're crazy or EXTREMELY limited on time)
Tallinn, Estonia
St Petersburg, Russia (overnight)
Helsinki, Finland
Stockholm, Sweden
Oslo, Norway
Aarhus, Denmark
This was a great itinerary and had NO days at sea. Compared to even just staying in the cheapest hotel in each city- our cruise fare was a bargain, and included transportation, food, and entertainment. Even if you want to spend more time in each city, you may find it cheaper to simply take two laps on cruise ships.
You should be aware that Russia will only allow you to get off the ship if you either have an independent visa (expensive) or take a cruise ship tour (also expensive- but, what we elected to do). Even with this expense included, it was still a cheaper option that independent travel in the region. In all the cities (aside from Warnemünde and St Petersburg) our ship docked very close to the city center and we were able to manage visiting everywhere we wanted using only public transportation. In Warnemünde, we elected to visit a nearby city (Rostock) by train independently, as we had a week planned in Berlin later in the trip, and it's a several hour train ride each way into Berlin from Warnemünde.
UAE and Oman
This was a simple 4 night Royal Caribbean cruise, Roundtrip from Dubai. Ports of call included
Dubai, UAE
Khasab, Oman
Muscat, Oman
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Priced around $450, and given the lack of any decent budget hotels in the UAE at the time, and given that I wasn't necessarily dying to spend forever in Oman, simply wanted to check it out, I found this to be a good value. At all the ports I was able to do my own explorations easily and was able to avoid the crowded, expensive cruise ship tours.
The day that the ship returned to Dubai, I awoke to find out that the entire city had been engulfed in a huge Haboob- This photo of my ship was taken without a filter and not edited. Things like that just happen. Luckily Dubai has a massive expanse of indoor spaces so I just wandered around the malls and used it as a shopping day.
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