If you’ve ever tried to book a cruise through a portal like Cruise.com or — heaven forbid — via a cruise line’s website, you know that it can be an incredibly confusing and costly experience.
The thing is, though, that it doesn’t have to be. Cruisable is a startup that hopes to take the obfuscation away and let you find affordable and/or incredibly fantastic cruise vacations with a website and app that won’t try to trick you.
“Cruises can be cheaper than other getaways,” said CTO and co-founder Giacomo Balli, “as low as a couple hundred dollars.”
Cruising is an almost $38 billion industry, with over 20 million people taking a cruise-ship vacation each year. A staggering 60 percent of those customers originate in North America.
Cruise lines travel all over the world; you’re not stuck with a basic Caribbean or Mexican cruise — why not travel to Alaska for 11 nights?
Of course, with the cruise industry’s anti-rebate policy that disallows cruise lines from undercutting each other, you can call each line to get the best offers. That’s incredibly time consuming, however, which is why sites like Cruiseable exist.
“The key benefit of Cruiseable,” said Balli, “is cutting through the noise and being able to compare apples to apples. No one has anything similar to our bliss filters and cruise compare.”
Better yet, there’s a rating system from people who have taken these cruises, like a Yelp for cruising. There are travel journalists that contribute, as well, to help you learn about each package, along with photos, over 500 original travel guides, and reviews of individual ships. You can filter your search using price, destination, date of travel, and what Cruisable calls “bliss filters,” which let you look for cruises to fit your vacation style: romantic, active, relaxing, cultural, and the like.
The combination here is between community content (which rates vacations), travel journalism and photos of the cruises themselves. It contains 500+ original travel guides, ship reviews and consumer articles created by Cruiseable editors and writers. Think TripAdvisor plus journalism for cruises.
The app itself is free, and Cruisable won’t charge you a thing for the convenience (they’re funded privately and the cruise lines pay them a commission fee). If you’re looking for a less-confusing way to book your next cruise, be sure to check them out today.
