Baby onboard: more cruise lines than ever are family-friendly, but sailing with an infant presents its own set of challenges - Cruise Guide

Cruise Travel, Jan-Feb, 2004 by Heidi Sarna

If you decide to take the plunge and bring your baby on a cruise, don't expect a lot of down time. It'll be a working vacation, no doubt, but a vacation nonetheless. And plenty of people sure think so. The numbers of families cruising with kids of all ages continues to swell. It's not uncommon to have from 800 to a whopping 1,200 kids--babies, toddlers, and teens--on the big ships of Disney, Royal Caribbean, and Carnival. Even much smaller ships, like Windjammer Barefoot's Polynesia and Legacy, which carry just over 100 passengers, can get about 40 kids during holiday and summer sailings. The high-end sees its slice of family business, too, with Crystal attracting as many as 100 kids on holiday cruises, and Radisson's Seven Seas Voyager had 70 kids on a recent Baltic sailing. The bottom line: The convenience of cruising, with everything practically at arm's length, is a strong draw for families.

This past summer, I decided to test the waters myself and carted my nine-month old twin boys to Bermuda on Celebrity's Zenith and, a few weeks later, to the Caribbean on Carnival's Carnival Legend. Both cruises sailed roundtrip from New York, where I live. After taking nearly 100 cruises sans off-spring, I was in for quite an education. Here's what I learned.

Choose a ship that offers babysitting for, well, babies. Some lines only offer it for toddlers on up. After an exhausting day chasing crawling babies and pushing strollers, the reward of a quiet dinner alone at the end of it is what gets you through. It's essential. Of those lines that have babysitting for infants, it's either private babysitting in the cabin or group babysitting in the playroom. Both have their pros and cons. If you can get past the fact that a stranger will be sitting in your cabin and minding your offspring for a few hours while you enjoy a quite dinner, incabin babysitting is the most convenient. Celebrity, Royal Caribbean, and the high-end lines offer it. Standard practice is making your request for a sitter 24 hours in advance at the purser's or the guest-services desk, though I found I could often be accommodated with less notice. Rates typically range from $8 to $10 an hour, though sometimes go as high as $25 an hour (Radisson). Lines have different policies about in-cabin babysitters. Celebrity, for example, only uses female crew-members from the hotel department (stewardesses) and kids program. Some lines, like Royal Caribbean, can't guarantee which department your sitter will come from. If you're only comfortable with a female sitter from a certain department, request that (though keep in mind it may not be available). Most lines have a minimum age requirement of between three and six months to cruise and to be part of any babysitting services (though, many lines will allow you to sign a waiver indemnifying them if you want to bring on a younger baby).

The Zenith, like the rest of the Celebrity fleet, offers in-cabin babysitting, and it worked fabulously for us. We scheduled a babysitter each evening from 8:15 to 11:15; late-seating dinner started at 8:30. Stella, a sweet cabin stewardess from Romania, arrived every evening on the dot just moments after my babies had miraculously fallen to sleep in their cribs. Stella sat on a chair in front of the cabin TV, with the volume on low and the cabin lights out. She gave us her beeper for the night in the event she needed me. She never did.

The other type of infant babysitting--group-style in the playroom--is also offered by Celebrity and Royal Caribbean, as well as Carnival, Norwegian, Disney, and Princess. Some people feel more comfortable with this set-up because their babies will be in the care of the line's official kids counselors in the ship's playroom where cribs are set up in one part of the room (older kids are often in another part of the room watching videos). Group-sitting rates are lower, typically $5 to $8 an hour. The down side is that the service typically starts at 10 p.m., so you'll have to take your babes to dinner with you. We did this on the Carnival Legend, putting the babies to sleep in their double stroller and draping it with a blanket to keep the light out. Each night they slept through dinner in the stroller, though when it came time to stroll them up to the playroom, things didn't always pan out in favor of our heading to the disco. The transition between stroller and crib or the wail of some other child, woke up my boys on several evenings. The counselors beeped me when my babies couldn't be consoled within a reasonable amount of time (you can get a beeper to use for the length of the cruise, a standard practice on ships with babysitting).

Disney and Cunard have nurseries, which boil down to baby-only group-sitting facilities. Disney's is offered for children ages three months to three years; Cunard's Queen Mary 2, ages one to two, while the Queen Elizabeth 2 has a facility for ages one to seven that combines a nursery with an area for the older kids.

As much as a babysitting service onboard can save your sanity, so too can driving to the ship. Considering the great number of ships sailing from U.S. ports these days--from Boston to Baltimore, Charleston to Houston, and San Diego to Seattle--it's easier than ever to drive to the ship and skip the hassles of flying. Why bother lugging your baby and all the gear needed to the airport?