European Quest Saving Money

Oceania Cruises has two pricing points. Well, three really. OLife, which includes airfare and one other amenity, such as a certain number of excursions, drinks, or onboard credit (OBC). OLife, without the included air, for which passengers get credit for not taking the airfare but can still get one amenity. CruiseOnly is the third option ... self-explanatory.

When we booked our European Quest cruise, we opted for OLife with OBC and took the credit for the included air. We’re usually coming from or going to a cruise from somewhere other than the US, so arranging our own air makes sense to us.

For the European Quest cruise, we have OBC — OBN really since it is non-refundable use-it-or-lose-it money — from two sources. One is the OLife perk mentioned above. The other is for having reached platinum level in the Oceania Club. Together they add up to a nice chunk of money. We don’t drink much, we seldom shop in the onboard boutiques, we don’t typically do ship-sponsored excursions, and our gratuities are prepaid by O as a platinum perk. So the funny money is usually spent on massage treatments. That is great when you have plenty of relaxing days at sea. On our upcoming 10-day cruise we have nine ports of call. Or putting it another way, we only have one day at sea. Not much time for a bunch of massages. What to do?

We can’t do anything about the platinum perk OBC ... it’s just there ... no way to remove it. But we can do something about the OLife OBC by converting our booking to cruise-only since we have yet to make the final payment. So that’s what we did today. Our cruisefare dropped by an amount commensurate with the O Life OBC we canceled. Sure felt good to save some money. Especially since we still have the platinum OBC, which combined with the spa voucher we get for being platinum, will still buy us a couple of massages. All’s good.Read more