What I Use: Alaska Cruise (Premium)

My wife and I travel a lot, but we’ve never been on a cruise, and it’s been an interesting and eye-opening experience. I’m surprised to say we’ve really enjoyed it, though it’s so different from the way we usually travel.

It’s also been a shocking lesson in unfamiliarity and complexity, so maybe I’ll get that out of the way first.

On the unfamiliarity front, this just isn’t the way we normally travel, and I mean that very broadly. We always do our own research and travel independently, and we travel as light as possible. But a cruise tosses both of those notions right out the window. This is a highly curated experience, and we needed to pack so much that we both brought two of the suitcases that we usually travel with, and we had to check them for the flight, ye gods. (We don’t own bigger bags.) It’s been a bit awkward.

It's also made me wonder about one of our pet travel maxims. I often write about introducing a certain, surmountable level of complexity into travel, the point being that my wife and I find overcoming challenges to be a rewarding part of the experience. But it’s important to find the right balance there. If it’s too challenging, it’s not fun. To date, most of our biggest travel-related challenges have been language-related, whether it’s the two decades we spent visiting Europe or the past year and a half in Mexico.

This cruise has been a challenge of a different kind, and we were both surprised by the amount of complexity in making this trip happen, as was everyone else we spoke with about this topic. I tend to think of cruises as a kind of mainstream American activity, something that would appeal to people who prefer Disneyworld (or whatever) over the types of trips we normally take. Which I know sounds condescending, though I don’t mean it that way. I just figured cruises would be easy.

They’re not, at least for newcomers like us. In a stunning moment of comeuppance, my wife and I, Raphael and his girlfriend, and almost everyone else we spoke with, has struggled with all of the myriad requirements we had to complete in order to make this trip happen. There were four separate mobile apps we had to deal with---ArriveCAN (for admission into Canada), Holland Navigator (for the ship, one of the worst apps I’ve ever used), VeriFLY (vaccination and COVID-19 test verification), and one for the travel company that TWiT used for the cruise---and each had its own multiple, often repetitive layers of requirements. And that was all before we got on the boat.

I won’t beat all that to death, but Rafael and I, and, separately, my wife and I, spent many, many hours together going over all this and figuring out how to move forward through the requirements. We also had to reconnoiter with both Leo and Lisa and Richard Campbell and his wife to figure out schedules for our excursions and other activities. In the end, it was all worth it: we were able to bypass the incredible sea of...