Aulani or Cruise

bevotex

Bevo with Mouse Ears
Joined
Sep 14, 2007
I am trying to get a cost comparison. We will either be doing 7 nights at Aulani or doing a cruise. It is fairly easy for me to determine my costs on a cruise, but I am totally lost on what to budget for Aulani. I am a DVC member so hotel costs are not a concern for me. I am expecting excursions on a cruise and an excursion from theresort are a wash. So, I am trying to figure out if daily food costs and other Aulani amenities would come in under the price of a cruise. Any opinions on this is greatly appreciated.

BTW-we have doen Disney cruises a couple of times (loved them), but if we cruise this time, we will likely take a different liner.

Thanks everyone.
 
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Depending on how many people are in your group and how much your cruise costs, Aulani will probably be cheaper, especially if hotel costs aren't part of the consideration.

The two big costs with Aulani are food and car rental.

I would budget food costs similarly to what you spend in the parks. If you are signature dinning folks in the park, you can spend the same at 'Ama'Ama and the restaurants next door at Four Seasons. If you are counter services folks, you can go to Ulu or the ABC store across the street. Cocktails run around $15 each at the resort. Hawaii in general is more expensive than the mainland, but then so are the Disney Parks. Of course, if you have a 1 or 2 bedroom unit, you can go to Costco and save on food. But then you have to cook and clean up after yourselves, which can be a bummer on vacation, especially if its one person doing all the work. I recommend happy hour at Monkey Pod, with half price apps, $10 cocktails, and $10 pizzas.

Cars rentals of course depend on the type of luxury you require, but for a week my experience is around $600 for a midrange vehicle. You don't have to pay for parking since you're DVC.

The spa at Aulani is amazing and I highly recommend it. It is pricey, but comparable to spa services on the DCL.
 
We just completed a 4 night Disney Cruise (9/16-20) and had a 6-night stay at Aulani around the same time last year. Aulani was significantly cheaper than the cruise, however, we had a 1-bedroom and mainly prepared meals in our villa, dining out just a couple of times. We rented a convertible for the week, and even with that cost and our flights, the cruise was more than double the cost of Aulani, once all expenses were factored in, and it wasn't as long as the Aulani trip.

That being said, there's only two of us, so we only had to buy 2 plane tickets and prepare meals for two while at Aulani. We live close enough to Port Canaveral that plane tickets aren't required for us for cruising. If you are going with a different cruise line, both trips may end up being closer in price, as DCL cruises are more than other cruise lines.

You may need to do a spreadsheet on it to figure it out.
 
I have been to neither (going to Aulani for the first time in a couple weeks!), but I was bouncing this idea around for quite a while. We were looking at Disney Cruise or Aulani and ultimately decided with Aulani mainly because we were able to rent points at a significant discount. We have a family of four, which impacts the price of the cruise, but an Aulani room price is fixed. Here are some of the questions that I needed to answer myself.

1. What value do I put in a room? We were comparing a verandah room vs a 1 bedroom. Renting DVC for the 1 bedroom for 4 beats any verandah cruise way out of the water. It probably will still come out cheaper than a porthole room.

2. How much are flights? We live on the west coast, so flying out to Hawaii vs flying out to Orlando was essentially a wash. San Diego was an option as well, but their cruises are significantly more expensive, which came close to covering flights.

3. Flexibility of schedule? We have two kids, with one in school, we prefer our DD to not miss school, so that severely limited what cruises we were open to taking.

4. Over all price. Hopefully this actually answer your question (I realized my first three points probably didn't address your questions at all). Since you are a DVC member, I would highly recommend you consider renting a car since your parking is free. We have a 6 day intermediate car rental in early Nov for $210. Food wise, we are not particularly drawn to the food at Aulani. We will probably grab some snacks and maybe try to budget in a Luau (a huge expense), but otherwise we plan on going to the Foodland (local Hawaiian supermarket) and Costco. We also love Hawaii and will explore restaurants outside the resort. We also plan on cooking most of our breakfast (macadamia nut pancake mix from Foodland). According to my own calculations, going on a DCL (so pricing might be different for you), the extra cost between cruising and Aulani was about $100 per person per night. We do not anticipate spending $400 a day on food. Essentially this is what it looked like for me.

(Cruise cost + tips, tax, etc) / (how long the cruise is) = price of the cruise per day.
This price came out to be about $800ish per day for us (because we have 4).

(Aulani DVC rental aka total cost + car rental) / (number of days) = price of alumni per day.
Pretty straight forward. We scored a 1 bedroom with rental for about $435 a day.

Aulani was cheaper by $365 a day for us. Compound that by 4 nights, it is a difference of $1460. I feel like $1460 for 5 days and 4 nights is more than enough for us.


I am sure I just rambled and not sure how much I helped but since I already typed it all... I hope it helps a little!
 


Food can be as cheap or expensive as you want it to be at Aulani. If you do not have a rental car and are not willing to get groceries, you can expect it to be pricey because you'll be relegated to the pricey meals at Aulani and tourist-priced restaurants across the street. If you have a rental car, it gives you the flexibility to eat at more affordable local places around the island while you're out exploring. You can also pickup groceries, since you'll have a kitchen staying DVC. I don't recall what we spent during our time at Aulani, but we did have snack items, bottled water, and quick/easy things for some breakfasts and some lunches.

We roughly priced out the cruise versus island hopping on our own, and it came out cheaper for us to do it on our own, and it also gave us more flexibility. Because of that, I would also agree that a week at Aulani would be cheaper.

ETA: I assumed you were looking at NCL's Pride of America cruise around Hawaii versus a week at Aulani? Or are you comparing a cruise somewhere in the Caribbean versus Aulani? I assumed you meant the Hawaiian cruise, but would probably add different comments if you're looking at a cruise in the Caribbean or somewhere else. For us, flying from the east coast, the cost to get to Hawaii is the most expensive part. We could easily fly to Fort Lauderdale or Miami to get on a cruise ship for a fraction of the cost, so in that case, it would likely be cheaper to do a cruise.
 
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I have been to Aulani twice and a cruise once. I am also a DVC member. For me, its Aulani all the way. We are doing a Royal Caribbean cruise this winter to break it up a bit but the cost of going to Hawaii is much less than the cost of a Disney cruise in my opinion. If you are looking for things to do look at the go Oahu card. For one price you get to do basically everything that you might want to do and its far less expensive than Disney cruise shore excursions are. The big expense in Hawaii is food but it all depends on what you want to ear, if you want to eat at Aulani everyday then you will spend a fortune on food
 


We are DVC and I was recently researching this very thing! We were either doing Aulani for 8 nights or a Royal Caribbean for 7 nights. Aulani won out b/c we get a 2 br where we can all stay in one room for considerably less than 2 separate smaller rooms on the ship.
 
Wanted to add you can basically consider the rental car cost as your “excursion” cost; there is plenty to do for free on Oahu. And ditto to what everyone else has said on food.

But most importantly....Roll Tide!!

(And if you’re still reading LOL, it was fun to go to Aloha Stadium and take a short tour.)
 
We go to Aulani a lot more than we ever thought we would when we first bought our DVC there. We bought BLT first and had planned to do Aulani maybe every 3 years due to the cost of getting our family there. However, we were told about the Alaska Airlines card and we now get two companion fares per year (my husband and I each got one), so we have found that Aulani is even cheaper than going to WDW for us when you factor in flights, park tickets, and food. We do normally get a 2 bedroom and usually eat breakfast in the room and maybe one other meal depending on what we are doing each day. We eat one meal out per day for sure and sometimes two. We don't really pay for excursions at Aulani and have found many things we love doing that are free. I also rent a vehicle as early as possible and just keep watching for a drop in price which happens quite a bit.

We do DCL cruises often too, and although they are expensive, we LOVE them! It's always a hard toss up when trying to decide between the cruises and Aulani for us, but Aulani seems to be more bang for the buck overall.
 

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