Alaska & Our First Cruise: Planning

Normally, we’re fairly self-directed travelers, and cruises aren’t necessarily our thing. In the past, we’ve seen overwhelming cruise crowds cram the streets of compact cities like Venice or Dubrovnik, and seen that as a poor experience.

However, Alaska is different. The main areas of Southeast Alaska (including the capital of Juneau) are not connected to the mainland by road. You essentially need to be on a ship to tour the region. When planning our vacation last summer, one of our kids really liked the idea of fishing in Alaska, so we resolved to visit. We first got a crash course in cruises, and ended up enjoying the cruise quite a bit.

How we planned

One of our best initial sources for information was Youtube videos. We enjoyed Gary Bembridge’s cruise channel, where he had many videos about planning an Alaska cruise (and many other destinations). For actually sifting through potential candidate cruises, we used sites like VacationsToGo and CruisePlum . That said, in the end, we actually booked through Costco since they had a nice rebate. (none of the links in the post are sponsored, we just liked them).

For us, our thought process for selecting a cruise was as follows:

We decided early on that we wanted to a cruise that included Glacier Bay National Park. Due to capacity constraints, there are mostly 3 cruise lines that do Glacier Bay (Holland America, Norwegian, and Princess).
We were targeting 7-10 days, given some school calendar constraints.
Seeing Glacier Bay effectively required a one-way cruise – from Seattle or Vancouver to near Anchorage, or the reverse. There are round trip cruises from Seattle, but those mostly don’t go that far north (at least within 7-10 days), as far as we could tell.
The most common ports that week-long cruises stop at in the Southeast are Ketchikan, Juneau, and Skagway. We checked that these were included.
We ideally wanted two adjacent/nearby cabins (one for parents, one for teens). We got this, but this took some effort, and whittled down our possibilities quite a bit, particularly given that we didn’t book that far in advance.

Once we filtered these constraints past our calendar commitments, we only really had 2 choices that would work, and we ended up choosing the option on Holland America that went from Vancouver to near Anchorage (Whittier).

In retrospect, Glacier Bay was nice to see once, though if we ever went again, I’m not sure how much we’d alter the itinerary to see it again.

Adding Denali + Other Items

As we were narrowing down the cruise, we realized that we wanted to try seeing Denali National Park, a few hours north of Anchorage. The cruise lines do sell add-ons for this, either by train or bus. Though given our independent traveler streak, we opted to rent a car and drive from Anchorage to Fairbanks, stopping near Denali.

Make sure to budget for other costs beyond the cruise fare and plane tickets:

Excursions are probably the next biggest significant line item, and a more important part of the trip than we would have initially expected. And unlike in, say, Europe where you might be dropped off near a city, in Alaska you might need more help and transportation to get to the headline sites.
We did get a soft drink package, which also included fizzy water and cappuccinos. It was fun, but in retrospect, it might have been mostly a wash cost-wise.
Wifi package options are worthwhile if you want to be connected at sea. Your phone’s data either won’t work at sea, or it will be insanely expensive (keep it on airplane mode).
Staff tips aren’t included in the base fares, but they are auto-added to the bill (roughly $15-20 per passenger, per day).
We didn’t bother with specialty dining – the main dining room was plenty nice for us. We bought a few tshirts, but otherwise skipped the shopping, gambling, spa days, photo packages, and other upsell. But regardless, the cruise lines are masters of upselling.

One pleasant discovery was that dining is now somewhat more flexible than the old-school cruise image – where people would sit around large tables with total strangers in a stuffy dining room. Maybe that still exists somewhere, but on our ship, people were seated as couples or families, like at a regular restaurant. We did get a set dinner time at the main dining room, but it seems that it have been easy enough to eat at an arbitrary time.

Our itinerary, including port activities:

Here’s the itinerary that we ended up with after planning:

Day 0: Flew to Vancouver the day before our cruise (never arrive the day of!). Spent the afternoon/evening exploring Vancouver.
Day 1: Boarded the Cruise in the early afternoon, sailed away.
Day 2: Day at sea.
Day 3: In Ketchikan. John and Jennifer went finishing with Baranof Fishing Excursions, while James and I saw the well-rated Great Alaskan Lumberjack Show and went to the Saxman Native Village.
Day 4: In Juneau. We did an excursion where we took a helicopter to a glacier and rode some sleds. Pricey but a fun time. We also visited the Alaska State Museum in town and explored the shops.
Day 5: In Skagway. We rode in the Skagway White Pass Railroad, a historic gold rush railroad.
Day 6: We saw around Glacier Bay National Park from the ship.
Day 7: Day at Sea.
Day 8: Disembark ship after breakfast. The ships dock at Whittier, which is a 75 minute drive from Anchorage. We booked the ACT Bus to the airport, and rented a car from there. We drove to Anchorage, stopped in Talkeetna, and spent the night near Denali.
Day 9: We went to the Savage River area in Denali, which is the furthest you could drive on your own. We would have considered a full tour of the park, but a rock slide in 2021 closed the main route until 2026. We then drove to Fairbanks, panned for gold outside town, and saw the Museum of the North.
Day 10: morning around Fairbanks, and a late afternoon flight.

One thing to note is that there was plenty of time on the ship in the evenings and sea days. We had time to catch up on reading, do exercise, and had plenty of memorable meals on board. Our youngest enjoyed the full gym. There were some shows and talks, and we did a “high tea” a couple times as well. All-in-all, it was a great trip!