Arthur's Blog: $43 a Night for a Trans-Atlantic Sailing in a Top Quality Ship Might Be a New Pricing Record

As we end the summer season and enter an autumn period of positioning cruises (transfers of giant ocean vessels from European waters to the Caribbean), plenty of sailings will be priced at $60 and $70 a night.  They need to be discounted that heavily because they spend many days simply at sea, crossing the Atlantic ocean, and because they are not stopping at a port a day, they are unpopular with the American public.  So the cruiselines aim to fill their cabins with Americans looking for sheer relaxation -- namely, day after day of simply crossing what seems like an endless expanse of water.

But I can't remember a sailing on a top-quality, one-category-up-from-standard, ship, priced as low as $43 a night.  That's the financial  wonder that Online Vacation Center (www.onlinevacationcenter.com; tel. 800/780-9002) seems to have devised for the November 30 departure from Southampton, England, of the upscale, 2,000-passenger Celebrity Constellation.  From Southampton (you fly into London to board it) on the Constellation, you go to LeHavre, France, then spend two days at sea sailing to Lisbon, spend another day at sea going to the Canary Islands, and then undertake a remarkable eight-night crossing of the South Atlantic to Miami.  All in all, you have spent a total of 15 nights on the ship, enjoying all-inclusive amenities (all three meals and soft beverages, all on-board entertainment), for which you can pay as little as $649 per person in an inside cabin ($43 a day/night), $849 in an outside balcony cabin ($56 a day/night).

Note that you'll have to add a trans-Atlantic flight to London to board the ship, and you'll then fly back from Miami to wherever you live.

Many more of these rock-bottom-priced positioning cruises will be announced in the coming weeks, but I very much doubt that we'll ever see anything lower than the Constellation's $43-a-day for its November 30 sailing.  And incidentally, the Constellation has an indoor swimming pool.