mevelandry
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Aug 22, 2013
Speaking for myself (and only for myself!), I've caught myself experiencing the urge to defend DCL's honor whenever someone says that they find better value elsewhere, think other cruise lines are better, etc. because I've realized that I have a little niggling fear in the back of my mind asking, "But what if I'm just wasting my money after all?"
Which, hey, I might be. I've only ever cruised once and it was DCL, and the next cruise for which my housemate and I have vague plans will also be DCL. I'm one of those people who has no context, who can't actually say whether or not I'd like Carnival just as well, or Royal, or Norwegian. So there's some fearful little part of me that wants to shut down any kind of possibility that my choice to spend the extra money on Disney might be a foolish one.
The thing is, though, as long as your answer to two particular questions is "yes," there's nothing wrong with going with a more expensive option. Those two things are:
1. Can you afford it?
2. Is it what you want?
So I just try to remind myself of that, and remember that even if I'm wasting my money...well, I'd technically be "wasting" it no matter where I cruised, because a cruise is a frivolous thing to buy regardless. Right now I want to cruise with DCL, and I can afford to do it about as often as I want to cruise at all. I'll re-examine the issue when one of those two things is no longer true. And when I catch myself worrying about it, I stop myself and I don't take it out on the people who are at a point in their lives where their answer to one or both questions is "no."
In our case, we had similar fear before we decided to try another cruise line. The argument who convinced us to jump was: "We're going to try it and if we don't like it, at least it won't be an expensive mistake".
Now, I don't see my past DCL cruises as a mistake because they brought us a lot of joy and introduced us to one of our greatest passion... But we can definitely appreciate having more money in our TFSAs (which may have not be possible if we were still sailing on DCL twice a year).