Thinking about booking...

[PHS79]

We are looking at possibly doing a DCL 4 night trip for either late Feb or Early March 2018 out of Port Canaveral. My wife, daughter (currently 7) and I would do 3 or 4 days at WDW before the cruise, and my parents would meet us for the cruise portion of our trip.

Since we have just started talking about this we have a couple of quick questions:

1. Does DCL have any "family suite" type rooms (like AoA does) or will we have to book 2 rooms?
2. Using DCL 2017 cruise dates as a rough guide, Disney Wonder pricing is alot cheaper that Disney Dream. Why? In a nut shell what is the difference between the 2 ships and/or sailings?
3. What deck and location is best to book a veranda room on the Wonder and Dream?

I know we will have more questions, but for now these are the big ones we have.

Thanks!

 

[EOD K9]

We are looking at possibly doing a DCL 4 night trip for either late Feb or Early March 2018 out of Port Canaveral. My wife, daughter (currently 7) and I would do 3 or 4 days at WDW before the cruise, and my parents would meet us for the cruise portion of our trip.

Since we have just started talking about this we have a couple of quick questions:

1. Does DCL have any "family suite" type rooms (like AoA does) or will we have to book 2 rooms?
2. Using DCL 2017 cruise dates as a rough guide, Disney Wonder pricing is alot cheaper that Disney Dream. Why? In a nut shell what is the difference between the 2 ships and/or sailings?
3. What deck and location is best to book a veranda room on the Wonder and Dream?

I know we will have more questions, but for now these are the big ones we have.

Thanks!

Unless you want to pay 10g for the Walt Disney suite, there aren't a lot of family suites. They do have one bedroom ones, but for two families, two rooms are better.
In a nutshell, The Wonder is a smaller ship. March is generally less expensive as well. The Dream is also a newer ship.

 

[MaryJaneP]

We have had 5 (2 adults, 3 kids) in one standard veranda stateroom on both Magic and Fantasy. We were not in our room during most of the cruise since there were so many things offered. Not sure of either ship you are mentioning, but Magic is like Wonder and we sailed Magic prior to it being re-imagined. Fantasy is apparently like the Dream, bigger than Magic, more decks than Magic, more passengers than Magic, but we did not notice a commensurate increase in things being offered. Perhaps we were too busy to notice. We actually preferred the Magic, may have been because it was our first DCL cruise. Hope you have a great cruise.

 

[ChuckElias]

As others have said, the suites on DCL go pretty quickly and are very pricey. However, I was on the Fantasy with a party of 5 and we were pretty comfortable in a Family Verandah stateroom. There was a queen bed, a fold-out couch, a bunk, and a Murphy bed. It was not bad at all. We had 3 adults, an 18-year-old and a 13-year-old. So we needed the space! It was not bad at all. Here are some pictures of our room, so you can see the sleeping arrangements:

 

[pilka214]

With only 3 guests in a cabin you should be fine with a mini-suite balcony room, The rooms are larger than industry standard. I'd recommend around deck 9. The Dream is a larger, newer ship, that the wonder so it costs a bit more, also itinerary will change the cost of a cruise quite a lot, but honestly you can't go wrong going on one of their "Smaller" ships, as they've seen plenty of attention over the past years and are great ships..

You really can't go wrong with Disney.

 

[NelleBelle]

If you do decide to book two separate rooms rather than squeeze all 5 into a room (I think if it were my family, we'd go for 2-seperate rooms since it's 4 adults and 1 child in your case), ask for connecting rooms. They can open your balconies (if you decide to book a verandah) and have one large verandah between the 2 rooms. Another difference between the 2 bigger ships is that they have the aquaduck waterslide (although I know they put a aquedunk body slide on Magic). Whichever ship you book on, your family will have a great time