With a little encouragement from friends smarter than me, I’ve decided to pour some time into CruiseSheet and try to make it into an awesome cruising resource and a real business.
I think that cruises are the best value in travel, bar none, and are seriously underutilized by many people who could easily afford them, backpackers and independent workers especially. Right now all cruise sites are hard to navigate, hard to search, and geared only towards older people. I want to make something that’s easy to use, makes it simple to find amazing cruise deals, and appeals to all ages.
If you haven’t seen CruiseSheet in a while, a lot has changed. The biggest new feature is an amazing customized newsletter. Put your email and home port in, and you’ll get a weekly update on the best deals in your city, your region, and all over the world. (Popup box for the newsletter shows up after 30 seconds)
I get a lot of newsletters, most of which I didn’t intend to sign up for, and most of them are an imposition. If you’re interested in cruising, this is going to be a newsletter that you look forward to receiving every week. So far we’ve sent out about 5000, and the response has been very positive.
You may also notice that there’s a lot more information available on CruiseSheet. You can see the star rating of each ship as well as every port it visits on the cruise. If you click the ship name, line name, or the to or from port, you can filter results by the item you clicked.
There’s a lot more coming up, too. I’ve worked really hard on cleaning up the data (you’d be surprised how many different ways different cruise lines spell “Barcelona”), so soon I’ll be able to do some really neat things.
I’m also including taxes in price listings now. As far as I can tell, CruiseSheet is the only site to do that. I was really shocked at how much this shuffled the order of best deals. Some of the cheapest cruises had really high taxes, bringing slightly more expensive cruises with low taxes to the top.
There’s also a contest coming up to win any cruise you want for two, up to $5000. If you win, you could easily travel for over a month on a 4.5 star cruise with a friend. I’ll probably announce it here, but if you want to make sure you get it, you should sign up for the newsletter.
On my last cruise I met a reader and his girlfriend. They said that since they heard about cruises from my blog, they’ve been on eight! Just a testament to how awesome cruises are. Maybe I’ll see you out there on the high seas someday, too.
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Photo is looking over the edge of the last ship I was on, the Holland America Ryndam.
I’m also starting a CruiseSheet twitter. Not much there now, but I’m setting up a bunch of cool stuff for it.
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