En route to the Carnival Ecstasy…
Before you can get to Galveston, you have to get to Houston. And getting from Houston to Galveston to get on a cruise ship can be a costly proposition.
Carnival provides transfers, but only on the day the cruise leaves, and the price is $80 return. Taking a taxi for the 90-minute ride from George Bush International will run at least $60 one way and, if you arrive the night before your cruise (as we did), you still have to get from the hotel to the cruise ship.
We opted to rent a car. Shopping around produced the best option: $111 for a car, for five days. Transportation at both ends of our cruise, to and from the airport.
The real treat was getting the car. At Bush International, there is ONE shuttle bus. It services all the car rental companies, which all have counters in the same building, five minutes from the terminal. Now if you’ve ever been to LAX, or countless other airports, there is car rental bus after car rental bus.
The drive to Galveston is 90 minutes in traffic, no more than an hour in off times. Our hotel, the Four Points by Sheraton — it’s only been open a few weeks — sits right on the Gulf of Mexico. And it allows cruise-ship passengers who stay there to leave rental cars in the lot for five days, at no charge. Parking at the cruise-ship terminal is $10 a day.
Because what started out as a costly add-on to our cruise (we weren’t thinking about ALL those extra expenses) turned out to be simple and efficient, we thought anybody considering a cruise out of Galveston — Carnival and Royal Caribbean both have ships there — would like to know.