Surprise Them With a Cruise!

Okay- if you are like me (and I recognize not everyone is) I love planning family trips. We don’t always take the trips I plan but I love pricing out different trips and options. I really enjoy having my kids be part of the planning but sometimes it is nice for them to have a surprise.

For this particular trip it was a surprise at Christmas Time.

We have never been brave enough to surprise our kids with a cruise the morning of or anything like that. Mainly because that would cause a bit of anxiety for our kids and our teen needs to be able to pack what she wants.

How Far Out for The Surprise

When you are considering how far out for the surprise you have to consider your own kids. Some kids cannot handle the level of excitement that a trip brings for a whole week. Some need some time to process the excitement so wouldn’t like to little of notice. For us we gave about a weeks worth of notice. Now keep in mind just because we only gave the kids about a week of notice I had already been planning and packing for weeks prior. (Because lets be honest, moms can’t do a trip like that with no notice!!!)

We decided that we didn’t want to just tell the kids that we were going on a Disney Cruise, we wanted the reveal to be full of excitement. More on that below.

Keep in mind that even if you do a few days or a week like we did our youngest kids still had a really hard time understanding the concept of a few more days. If we were ever to do a surprise trip again I would create a really cool Disney countdown where they can visually see how many days left.

Ways to Surprise your Family with a Disney Cruise

Give them an envelope with Cruise Tickets in them
Giving gift of luggage with beachwear inside
Printing out a cute poem telling them about the trip
Giving a trip countdown
Buying Disney Merch to Give them
Scavenger hunt

Scavenger Hunt

Planning this reveal was probably as exciting for my husband and I as it was for my kids going through it. I am generally not a good secret keeper about trips because I love them so much so this was realllly hard for me to keep this secret from my kids. I found some a template and made some cards for the scavenger hunt.

The cards had something “Disney-ish” on them. We have 4 kids so we chose one at random to start the hunt.

This was a Christmas Gift and this particular year we had a horrible winter storm where our whole town was shut down so we decided to do this on Christmas Eve. It was the perfect time because all of our typical plans were canceled because of the weather.

The scavenger hunt had the kids running all over the house and each kid got to find a clue. This part was really fun because they had no idea what they were going to be finding in the end.

Once the cards had them running all over the final card took them to the dining room and on it was a box wrapped in all Disney wrapping paper. Inside the box were Minnie Mouse sweaters and ears and some little Disney Characters.

At this point they were confident that they were going to Disney World. They had been to Disney World a few times already but still were so happy that they thought this was where they were going.

But at the bottom of the box was a puzzle. For this I just used an image with text over it saying “We are going on a Disney Cruise”. They put the puzzle together and the surprise was revealed. They were so excited- such a fun idea!

Planning for the Trip

For the next few days it was so much fun signing into the Disney Cruise app and seeing the countdown to the cruise. It has days, hours, minutes and seconds this was really fun for them to check on.

They were able to gather their trip essentials that they have to have such as a few toys or books for traveling.

The best part as we took the time to watch so many ship tours on You Tube. This was a lot of fun and gave the kids so many things to look forward to.

Overall

If you are brave enough to try surprising your family with a trip I think you should do it. It was so much fun for our family and I think helped with the waiting for the trip compared to them knowing months and months ahead of time.

If you want to check out some more Family Travel Trip Ideas and Tips check out Blog – Together We Can Travel