Get Up to $10,000 Credit Per Cruise!
If you book any cruise, anywhere in the world through CDV we will give you up to $10,000 of credit per cruise booking (including multiple rooms on the same booking) toward any CDV Land Vacation. If you do a group cruise we arrange, we can calculate the credits to go well beyond the $10,000. Plus you can add them up and combine them in just about any way you want. See the info below for combing, as well as the few restrictions that may apply.
Vacation Credit Scale
| Cruise Price | Credit Earned |
|---|---|
| $2,500 - $4,999 | $100.00 |
| $5,001 - $7,000 | $300.00 |
| $7,001 - $10,000 | $450.00 |
| $10,001 - $15,000 | $750.00 |
| $15,001 - $20,000 | $1,000.00 |
| $20,001 - $35,000 | $1,250.00 |
| $35,001 - $50,000 | $1,750.00 |
| $50,001 - $80,000 | $2,500.00 |
| $80,001 - $99,999 | $4,000.00 |
| $100,000 - $149,999 | $5,000.00 |
| $150,000 - $199,999 | $7,500.00 |
| $200,000 & Up | $10,000.00 |
* Cruise price is equal to the base cruise fare, minus Port Fees, Cruise Line NCF Fees and Taxes as shown on cruise confirmations.
How is this Better than Our Onboard Credit Offer?
The onboard credit offer allocates an amount that must be spent in full during the cruise, and any unused portion is forfeited.
Additionally, it is applied only immediately before you sail, cannot be applied to anything else, and is based on the price of each room, not the value of multiple rooms added up. Our CDV Tour Credit offer applies the total value of your cruise in full (minus included airfare, port charges, expenses, taxes, fees, and travel protection) toward any CDV Tour you go on, can be saved for the future, and can be accumulated. It can also be immediately applied to any CDV tour, so if you decide to combine a cruise and a CDV Tour, we can apply your cruise credit directly to the tour you will be taking. Additionally, your CDV Tour credit can be gifted.
Here are a few examples:
(1) Over the course of two years, you take 5 cruises that you book through us. Each cruise was worth $26,000. You will now have $6,250 in CDV Credit that you can apply toward any CDV Tour or combination of tours.
(2) You are a member of a group that wants to do a group cruise. You have us arrange 30 rooms at a cost of $5,100 per room. You will now have $7,500 in CDV Tour credit. You can use that for yourself, or divide it with others in your group.
(3) You and two couples decide to take a world cruise together. Based on typical pricing, you will likely get $22,500 in CDV credit. That is enough for you to get some of our most prestigious tours completely comped for all six of you.
(4) You plan a large group cruise with 200 rooms, priced at $2,500 per room. You decide as the group planner to accrue the credit for yourself to u however you desire. You now have $50,000 in CDV Tour credit to use however you wish.
Price and Service
As for price, CDV will always get you the absolute best price that the cruise line offers, and often better. We have access to the same incentives the cruise lines offer to every cruise agency out there, and will always pass them on to you. We even offer price protection when cruise lines allow repricing of cruises that they drop their price on. In many cases we will have blocked out space on a cruise that can get you a significantly lower price than offered to the public. Add that to the credit, and it is pretty hard to beat.
As to service, we are CDV! That simply does not change. We are about relationships and looking our for our guest’s interests. Nothing changes here in that respect. You will be planning with our team, people you know, people that know you, and people that want this to be perfect for you. Our guests know that we are all about going way beyond, and we are there for you before, during, and well after your trip.
Combining a Cruise with a CDV Vacation
First, if you combine a CDV vacation with a cruise we reserve on your behalf, we will apply the credit directly to the CDV vacation you are going on so you claim the credit right away.
As to what it would all look like, suppose, for example, that you want to take a CDV vacation in Italy and combine it with a Mediterranean cruise. Or you want to take a Portugal CDV trip and combine it with a Douro River Cruise. It is going to be like planning one trip with us. Whichever CDV trip you want to take, we will help you combine it with a matching cruise and we will organize all of the transfers in between to make it seamless for you. For example, you may do our Amalfi Coast week, and want to take a cruise in the Mediterranean afterwards. We will help you pick a cruise that leaves right after the CDV week. If the cruise leaves from Naples, we will take you right to the port. If it leaves from Rome (Civitavecchia), we will organize your transfers to get you to the ship. If you want to do a Douro river cruise before or after one of our Portugal weeks, there is always one on the same day that our weeks begin and end. We’ll take you right to the riverboat, or pick you up directly from it. Similarly, if you want to do a River Cruise on the Rhine, Danube, or anywhere else in Europe, we will help you organize everything between the CDV Vacation and the cruise to make it absolutely simple for you.
Combining Credits
Credits can be combined per cruise or per room, whichever yields greater credit for you.
Simply put, when you look at the chart above, and you calculate the bonus based on the value per room, or you calculate the bonus based on the overall cost of a single cruise with multiple rooms, we will give your the higher value of the two.
How to Use the Credits
Any credits you collect can be combined to use in any way you desire on and CDV Land vacation. They cannot be applied to other cruises or any other vacation that is not operated by CDV. If you have enough credits to pay for an entire CDV vacation, feel free to use them. If you want to come with a group of people and would like to distribute the credits among others on the vacation, just let us know and it will be done.
If after applying credits toward a CDV Tour, you still have remaining credits, you will not forfeit the remainder as long as they are used within the allotted time period.
HOW ARE WE ABLE TO OFFER THIS?
One of the things we love about being us is that we are completely transparent. Travel agencies earn a commission from the cruise lines. The reality is that a good travel agency does a tremendous amount of work to earn that commission.
However, there are also budget “call center” travel agencies that practice something called advance rebating. They work on sheer volume, and basically, just have low-paid people in a boiler room doing as many reservations per hour as they can. They will typically pay the cruise line a portion of the expected commission, knowing that the full commission will come to them later.
This lowers the price in your eyes as it shows as an additional discount. Otherwise, they will offer “onboard credit” to you that you must spend during the cruise at an inflated price and forfeit anything unused. They simply deduct the value you used from their expected commission. Or they may offer cabin upgrades based on a perceived value, rather than the actual value of the upgrade. This can be sold as a $500 value, for example, but may only cost them $30 or $40. If that upgrade is available, it is also available to us. We will just be upfront and tell you what the opportunity is without inflating a false perceived value.
Additionally, you will find that companies that offer advance rebating require a minimum room price of $5,000 after taxes, port fees, and NCF Fees. As evidenced on our website, we are happy to match this, but it is not the greater value.
For example, take a typical cruise on Celebrity Cruises for two people with a room price of $6,000. One would expect that to qualify for the $200 credit. But once you take out the taxes, port fees, etc. the cruise price is actually $4700, so it does not qualify for the credit. This is why we lower our minimum on the CDV Tour Credits!
These are all sales tactics to drive high volume. But since these companies work on pure volume, they must sacrifice service. That person taking your reservation is trying to move on to the next person as quickly as possible. Once they have the reservation, good luck if you have any needs.
If you want that kind of bonus, we can surely offer it as well based on the same restrictions as the others. Click here for details, but the real value is in the CDV credits. Unfortunately, we cannot combine the two.
So how can we do this without resorting to these tactics? We are an international Tour Operator, that also functions as an agency. As a well-known Tour Operator, we get lots of special benefits and access that the vast majority of travel agencies can only dream of. This puts us in a very unique position to be able to offer our guests a hybrid that effectively accomplishes the value (and usually much more) than those budget call centers offer, without needing a huge volume that sacrifices service in order to do it.
By reserving your cruise with us, we will also get that commission after your cruise. But instead of playing the somewhat sleazy sales games, we can offer a big chunk of that commission in the form of a credit on our trips. What that means to you is that you generally get even more value, and for us, we make a little on the cruise and a little less on the CDV vacation, but overall, it allows us to be able to afford the time and energy to truly serve our guests without having to compensate with huge volume. In other words, it is a Win/Win without tricks, schemes, or sacrificing our high ethical standards.
Best yet, since we operate the way we do, we can also offer advance rebating just like the others, because the vast majority of our guests take us up on this more valuable offer.
Restrictions
- Credits expire two years after your cruise. However, you can apply them to future CDV vacations that extend past the two-year cutoff so long as they have not expired by the time you decide to apply them.
- The cruise price applied to credit is equal to the base cruise fare, minus Port Fees, Cruise Line NCF Fees, and Taxes as shown on cruise confirmations.
- Due to contractual limits with cruise lines, this offer only applies to U.S. and Canadian Residents.
- All credit is in United States Dollars. If your cruise is in Canadian Dollars, the credit applied will be based on the exchange rate at the time you make payment for the cruise.
- If a cruise is canceled before departure for any reason, credits will not be granted.
- If a cruise credit is applied as a partial payment toward a CDV trip, it will be applied to the final balance due, not the deposit. Click here for more info.