Looking for recommendations for great Alaska cruise

[Anonymous]

For a multigenerational trip (grandparents, parents, kids); I have never been on a cruise or to Alaska before. Bonus points if you did a cruise and then also a land based trip. I'm looking to plan a 2 week trip in summer 2024.

[Anonymous]

I’ve posted multiple times with details about our trip in 2017. If you search you can find it. But essentially we flew into anchorage, rented a car, stayed there a couple days, drove to denial and stayed at the grande lodge for a couple days, drove back to anchorage, returned car, got bus to Seward stopping at wildlife refuge along way, and then took RCI Seward to Vancouver and did a day in Vancouver. It worked great, We didn’t want to do the land tour through cruise line because it is expensive and you are in a large group on someone else’s schedule. If you can drive, it’s easy to just do the anchorage-Denali part on your own. I think we had a minivan that fit 7 for the grandparents. If you’re lucky you can get a one way rental anchorage to Seward and drive yourself to port but those one way rentals are extremely limited and we could not snag one for that trip (we did on an earlier trip), but the bus was actually really nice —a big coach that picked us up from hotel.

I think Hal, RCI, and Princess are all pretty equivalent for the one way inner passage trips. So just pick the one that has the timing you want and the cabin availability and configuration.
The un cruise or small cruise ships are a different story but are expensive and not as well suited to limited mobility elderly folks.

[Anonymous]

We've done cruise/land trips to Alaska. We've done Disney and Holland America and loved both. For multigenerational I recommend Disney. If leaving out of Vancouver, I highly recommend adding a few days to spend there. We also spent a week in Denali National park. We rented a cabin and it was amazing!