http://www.bahamas-travel.org/bahamas-cruise-wedding-package/
Carnival Cruise Line Wedding?
My fiance and I are thinking about getting married during our Carnival Miracle Cruise to The Bahamas next May. Has anyone ever been married on a Carnival Cruise Line? The specific package we are looking to go with is the “Shore Side” Welcome Aboard Package. Has anyone used this particular package? Thanks for the help!
To be honest, for my sister’s wedding we looked at that a lot. We were going with the Carnival Liberty.
We agreed with you that we DEFINITELY didn’t want to do the in port ceremony. That made no sense. If I’m at an island, I want to be off enjoying the island. If we could have done it during a day at sea, it might have worked but not wasting our island time. Plus the pictures will be a thousand time better if you have the island background–not a ship’s railing.
Be very careful about the additional guests charge. Unfortunately with so many variables, it’s kinda hard to know until the last minute exactly how many guests you are going to have. My sister was going to have somewhere between 12 and 23. We finally got it settled at 15 but by sailing it was 12 again. With one family variable that’s $100 range. We were looking at the Bride and Groom pkg + additional guest fee charge.
Then of course the price varies based on the date of sailing and all this. It was just ending up too difficult to get our questions answered.
What we ended up doing was having the wedding in St Thomas. We went with Island Wedding Services. They had all the info on their website including how to get the marriage license. The lady (Michelle) had info about renting a limo (we didn’t), the cake (we didn’t), renting the beach, the minister, the flowers. It was a good deal cheaper too. Ended up being about $500 for flowers, minister, and site. We used the I-pod and downloaded from Amazon the Carnival Steel Drum cds.
We sailed with Holland America on the Eurodam. My one piece of advice–either don’t order the cake through the cruise ship or don’t take any pictures of the cake/ don’t care what it looks like at all. Ours was….well just email me if you want to see a picture. It was…interesting.
We sent a picture of this gorgeous cake but simple with just a chocolate ribbon and topped with orchids. We got big frosting cherries and birthday candles. My sister and I were cracking up but my mom was nearly in tears. It was tacky to the extreme with every flavor they had in the kitchen–each person’s piece had a different flavor from strawberry to orange (none were passion fruit which was what it was suppose to be). Even the taste was terrible and luckily there was enough for 2 nights worth (though everyone opted for Baked Alaska instead).
We saw several cruise ship weddings on board though. It was great. The room they used for the “reception” was beautiful. However all the night shows and comedians are going to drag you front and center. My husband would have died.
Our biggest problem with the cruise ship wedding was the pictures. I don’t know how much that was going to be and couldn’t get any answers from CCL. On St Thomas our photographer was $200 for a CD of all his pictures. On the cruise ship, they usually charge you $20 for a single picture so I was concerned at how much 100 wedding pictures would be. Plus you wouldn’t be able to buy your negatives which is really important if you want to make any copies in the future (like making mother’s albums).
My second issue was also picture related. Part of having a destination wedding was to get pictures of the beautiful island, the palm trees, the crystal clear Caribbean sea, and the perfect white sand. On the boat you miss all of that.
So I saw several of those weddings happening and they looked gorgeous but I wanted to share with you the reasons we decided not to go with it.
Wedding Day Slide Show Carnival Cruise