Getting to your PC cruise

We are looking at full transits, but non-roundtrip airfare is a killer. We'd love to hear about any strategies for dealing with this part of the trip. We live in New York so we'd by flying both to the embarkation port and from the end port. Most likely we'll go from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and the two cruises that are on our shortlist are Princess (Coral) and Windstar (Wind Spirit).

We're really hoping we can make this bucket list cruise work!

Being in Florida I am only faced with one oneway ticket and for that I have used Southwest most of the time. A couple of times I have used the big airlines since once in awhile they will beat SW. For other oneway tickets I have used some of the big on line agencies that we can't mention on Cruise Critic. While I have not tried it, sometimes you can work with the airlines or your travel agent to get an "open jaw" ticket. Once in awhile the price of airline travel won't be too bad through whatever cruise air program your cruise line uses.

The ultimate method of beating the airline dilemma is to do what this one couple did on a Canal cruise I was on couple of years ago... they boarded in Florida and went round trip!!

You live in New York. NYC or somewhere upstate? Big difference.

Having said that, do you have "miles" with any airline? Several airlines now have one-way awards that are half of round trip awards.

We did the full transit two years ago, FLL to LA (Island Princess). Great trip. Flew home on United (to CRW via IAD) for 12,500 miles each.

Otherwise check all the major airlines and JetBlue, Virgin America, Southwest.

I always start with http://matrix.itasoftware.com. You cannot buy a ticket, but schedule and fares are very comprehensive.

We made the canal trip from LA to Ft Lauderdale on the Coral Princess, spent one night in Florida and returned to LA on the Island Princess. That worked well for us, and if you calculate the total cost and savings, it makes it a good deal. No air fare for us.

We are doing a similar trip on the NCL Star in November this year (going round trip).

I suggest checking the cruise schedules and see if something like that would work for you.

We've booked Celebrity FLL to Valparaiso, Chile for December 2014. One of the reasons why we selected Celebrity was specifically because of the cost of the one way return flights from Chile. Using Celebrity's Choice Air program brought the cost of the one way flight down from (roughly) $1200/person to $650, just before the Christmas holidays! (One couple returning to Raleigh, another to Phoenix) Flights all on Delta and require a change of planes in ATL. And yes, we were allowed to book flights home that allowed us to stay in Chile for a few days after the cruise.

We plan to drive (from Virginia) to Florida, stay in a park/cruise/fly hotel and fly via SW very inexpensively to LA then make the full transit back to our vehicle.

from the west coast I see the fares are running just over $300 one way. hoping fares come down.

We git GREAT one way fares from Choice Air fir the international side of our booking. For the totally domestic flights, we did better on our own.

Choice Air is Celebrity's air booking agency. I think this is the ONLY time we've been better off using cruise supplied air instead of doing it on our own. Cut our one way flight cost more than half. Two couples - (Santiago, Chile - Raleigh, and Santiago - phoenix.)

Since Southwest started doing it, most US airlines seem to charge 1/2 of round trip fare for one way in the US. Maybe that is not true for small airports, but has always been the case when I have traveled. I have had to book one way trips for 3 Panama Canal cruises and never paid more than half of the round trip fare for each of the legs. For international flights, though, this is usually not the case. But, many airlines will let you book one way award for 1/2 of the round trip reward so it is a good time to use miles, if you have them.

Try buying all one way tickets. I recently priced out a trip from the Midwest to NY to Miami back to the Midwest and the single itinerary was double the cost

than if I just bought all one way tickets.

And I just bought a "multiple destination" ticket on United. Cost was slightly (but only very slightly) less than two one ways...and forwhatever reason the longer (SEA-IAH) leg was only slightly ($110) more in First class than it was in Econ+ so jumped on that also!:D

Suggest you look at ALL alternatives - departure airports (Seattle was cheaper than Vancouver for our flight), arrival airports, staying a day longer can sometimes save big bucks...if we could afford the two extra vacation days on either end, we could have saved BIG bucks by flying on Tuesdays or Wednesdays rather than on Saturdays....but no can do.