What are the hidden, everyday luxuries that make luxury cruising feel truly special, beyond the suites and gourmet dining? In this solo episode of Luxury Cruising, Dr.Krystal Sodaitis shares her top six underappreciated perks that often surprise even seasoned cruisers: included laundry, plush robes, in-room coffee makers, butler service, afternoon canapés, and priority tendering or debarkation. These small-but-mighty details elevate the entire experience, save hassle, and add that extra layer of comfort and convenience.
In this solo episode of Luxury Cruising, Dr.Krystal Sodaitis spotlights six underrated perks of luxury cruising that don't always make the brochures but deliver outsized joy and practicality. From the game-changing convenience of included laundry, to the simple pleasure of a plush bathrobe after the pool or hot tub, she breaks down why these features matter, especially on longer voyages or in variable weather. She dives into in-room coffee/tea setups for relaxed balcony moments, the surprising versatility of butler service (beyond unpacking), the perfectly timed afternoon canapés that hit just right, and the sanity-saving perks of priority tendering and debarkation.
Listeners will walk away appreciating how these "little things" turn a great cruise into an effortlessly luxurious one, and why they keep her and many others coming back to luxury lines. She invites listeners to share their own surprise perks via email or comments.
Episode Highlights:
About the Host:
Dr. Krystal Sodaitis is a pediatrician, executive, and life coach for neurodiverse physicians—and the passionate host behind Luxury Cruising. She brings expert insight and honest excitement to every interview, helping curious travelers elevate their adventures at sea.
📍 Website: luxurycruising.net
📧 Email: luxurycruisingpodcast@gmail.com
🔗 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/krystalsodaitis
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[00:00:00] Welcome back to Luxury Cruising. I'm your host, crystal Sodaitis, and I've got maybe six. Underappreciated or maybe even unknown perks of luxury cruising that I really want to talk about. I really wanted to get these all in one episode because they come up here and there. Um, but this is your go-to episode for what are the best.
Unknown, underappreciated perks of luxury cruising. The first, you've heard me talk about this time and time again, and that is the perk of laundry. I can't express enough how great it is to. Come back to your state room and have a pile of freshly folded and laundered clothes. It is just so nice, and sometimes they're on a hanger and you can just put them into the closet and [00:01:00] sometimes they're really nicely folded and you can just pop it right into the drawers.
Laundry comes in handy in so many different ways. The first is you can definitely pack less. If you are someone who maybe just wants to try and use a carry on, um, then you can definitely fit maybe three or four, uh, changes of clothing into your carry-on, plus your shoes and all of your other stuff.
And then you just cycle through those two or three outfits, especially on a one week cruise. You can totally cycle through those outfits, get the laundry done, maybe midway through the cruise, and you don't have to bring as much as many clothes. It's easier to pack, it's easier to unpack.
We heard last week from Sylvia who was in French Polynesia for a few days, and before getting onto her Paw Gagan and Matt Cruz was 11 days, imagine having to take, we're [00:02:00] talking close to two weeks worth of laundry if you consider the days before and then the flight back,
two weeks worth of clothing without being able to do laundry. That's a lot of clothes and a lot of packing, so having laundry on board, especially when it's included. Now, I will say that some luxury lines do have their own machines where you can do your own laundry. So if that's something that's on your mind, please do either reach out to your travel agent or reach out to the cruise line and see does this particular ship have.
Their own washing machines on board, but being able to
do your pre cruise time and then maybe get a load of laundry done in the first day or two that you are on the ship is really just such a nice perk. The other perk comes in the other side. Obviously, if you're doing any post cruise time, any post cruise stays, again, it's really nice to be able to get off the ship and go to your next destination or to your [00:03:00] hotel room with a set of freshly LA clothes.
Again, they come nicely folded for you, so all you have to do is pop 'em into your suitcase and If you're not having a pre cruise time and you're going home, then it's really nice to just be able to have that laundry done when you get home. And we've talked about that before about how sweet it is to be able to come home and not then have to deal with a giant.
Pile of laundry. it's a little bit of a cherry on top of your vacation. When you get home, the laundry's done. You take it outta the suitcase, you put it in your drawers, and it's done. I mean, maybe you have a couple of things right that you have to do, but you can just throw that into your regular laundry basket and do it the next time you do laundry.
No big deal. The next underappreciated. Perk of luxury cruising. Again, something you've heard me talk about [00:04:00] before, and that is the plushy robe. Now, maybe you are not someone who generally uses a robe at home after the shower. I really like getting out of the shower and putting on a robe. Sometimes I walk around my house in the rope.
Sometimes I just do it to put on my makeup. But I really like a warm, soft, comfortable rope. So, going onto a cruise ship and having a really nice bathrobe is luxurious to me because it's just lets me stay in my preferred home routine. The bathrobes were generally really, really soft.
Really, really plushy and. It's just something I really look forward to on a ship. The other reason why I love the bathrobes is yes, I am one of those people who would walk around the ship in their bathrobe. I don't do it as much anymore because I get really weird looks from [00:05:00] people and my family.
It's a poly, but I just love to be able to, I mean, I'm not going to dinner in my bathrobe, but I would much prefer a warm bathrobe to take to the pool and be able to put on after the pool than just like wrapping a little towel around me walking around the ship in my bathrobe. Even the coverup especially if you're in the Caribbean, a lot of women, they wear these coverups, um, and coverups are generally.
Lightweight. Some of them are sheer or almost see-through. And they don't really keep you warm, but there are times when we're cruising where the outside temperature is chilly. You still wanna get in the pool or maybe you're in the hot tub. And then the worst part about getting out of the hot tub we all know is when the air temperature is freezing.
And so to be able to jump outta that hot tub into a nice soft plushy robe to me is. The best, [00:06:00] the absolute best. I hope that when I make it onto a smaller luxury ship, we're talking a couple hundred people. I will be able to go back to my ship wandering in my bathrobe, because I just feel like it's so comfortable.
The next underappreciated perk is the in room coffee maker. You generally find this in junior suite and above. On. Royal Caribbean and in other high end suites. In other lines some of the cruise lines that cater to more of an English and European market instead of a coffee maker, they might have a tea kettle.
Um, because tea is much more common abroad than it is in the us. But I love having an in room. Coffee maker. And why is that? it's not a Mr. Coffee. Okay. It's usually a nice higher end coffee maker. It has the little, like discs, I can't remember what they're called, but it's got the little discs that you put in [00:07:00] there.
Typically they give you there's like packaged creamer, but I have also asked for like soy milk and put it into our not refrigerator. It's not a refrigerator. It's just really like. A cooler, but it'll keep in there for not a long time, but a day or two. So in the afternoon, you get back, you just want a little, pick me up.
You can even do decaf. I really like drinking coffee. I really like having a nice decaf coffee in the afternoon. I wanna schlep down to wherever the little coffee service is, if you're on a luxury line or a river ship. A lot of river cruises do have a little coffee station. Um, but often, like, I don't wanna go down there.
I would just rather stay in my room, in my bathroom. And make myself a nice little coffee, the little creamer, um, and sit on my balcony, relax. Maybe read a little bit without having to go. I always asked [00:08:00] our state room attendant, when we have an in-room coffee maker, I always ask my state room attendant to put ice.
In the ice bucket and then let it melt. I know that the water from the sink is a hundred percent potable. I don't even drink from the sink at my own house, so I'm certainly not gonna do it from a cruise ship. I just feel much more comfortable having the melted ice in the ice bucket, and then I use the water.
To fill up the coffee maker with water. So hope that makes sense. But, um, that's just how I prefer it. I absolutely love my in-room coffee maker. I would probably love the in-room tea kettle as well. I enjoy tea as well, especially if I could have a little bit of milk or other kind of creamer with it.
Absolutely love it.
The next underappreciated perk I think is having a butler. I think that based on conversation on the podcast, [00:09:00] people do not realize. The number of things that a butler can do for you. Obviously a lot of people talk about the one thing that they don't want the butler to do, which is unpack or pack for you.
Um, many cruise lines, not everyone you need to ask the butler will either unpack or pack. I wouldn't mind somebody unpacking my clothes, packing my dirty clothes. I mean, if they're clean, you know, if we've gone through the launch part of this podcast and all it is is just taking my clean laundry and putting it into a suitcase, like, have at it, that's totally fine.
But I'm not having somebody pack up my dirty clothes. That's a hard no. but Butlers will do that. We have had people wear the butler, you know, brought them popcorn or other snacks To the state room. They've drawn them a bath. They've, um, made sure that they got their reservations and left and got their reservations on time.
The Butler is really about making your state room experience as luxurious as it possibly can. [00:10:00] Compare that to a concierge where a concierge is to make your experience outside the room as best you can. And again, and I think the concierge is probably underappreciated and underutilized too because they can make reservations for you.
They can help you with, um, excursions. If you have a question about excursions, if you need something, or if you have a question about the port. I've had concierges print out maps when, back in the day when I didn't have wifi and I didn't have, the ability to use Google Maps on my phone, the concierge printed something out for me.
So The concierge and the butler really can. Add a lot to your cruise and I think that is a little bit underappreciated. And speaking of bringing snacks, the other underappreciated perk is your afternoon cannae.
to me, afternoon canopies are the surprise that you knew was coming, but you don't know exactly know when, and often they're just that little bit. I mean, we eat so [00:11:00] much on cruises that. You are not thinking like, oh yeah, I could use a snack, but when those afternoon can, and it really is like. Four or five, one bite items, right?
It's like four or five, either little sweets or maybe they're little savory bites. Every once in a while. Um, it's a plate of fruit. And so, which is more than one or two bites, but still really nice. And it's just that amount where you're like, oh yeah, like I could eat something right now. Like, yeah, that sounds good.
you're not gonna go down and get it. You're not gonna go to the buffet. You're not gonna try and find the cafe. Just having that plate of like four or five bites that shows up in your room in the afternoon, it's perfect. And to me it always seems like the perfect timing. Maybe they plan it so that it's always after a port stop.
So right after the port, you're getting back to your room, you're maybe hoping to shower and change it. Oh, there are some little snacks. I didn't even have to think about it. [00:12:00] So if anybody knows. If those afternoon can pays are timed and how they're timed, please let me know. Write in the comments, send me an email.
I would love to know. And then the last, I think underappreciated perk is priority tendering. Uh, nobody likes tendering. I mean, let's just state it like nobody really likes tendering. I think all of us like to dock. Where we're going to dock in town or dock wherever we're gonna get off and start our excursion and immediately start to explore the town.
I mean, I don't even like. Having to take a bus into town, where there are some ports where you're kind of in either an industrial port or the port is a little bit outside the city, and then you either have to, you know, take a little shuttle or take a little, uh, a little bus into town. Like even that's not great for me.
But when I have to leave the boat, take a smaller boat to get [00:13:00] to land. I'm not loving it. But the point of this is. The process before tendering is also a pain because there's always a time when usually the day before you get to that port where you have to line up to get your tender ticket.
And for example, likeon our last cruise, I knew somebody who had a nine or 10:00 AM appointment that wasn't. Through the cruise line. So they needed to get off the ship in order to like get in an Uber to make their like nine or 10 o'clock appointment. And usually with tendering you have two options.
You can tender really early in the morning before the tender lines start to grow. And really early in the morning can be like six 30 or seven. Um, butlet's say you wanna leave after that time, maybe seven 30 or eight. Then the tender line starts to grow and the cruise line tries [00:14:00] to manage those tender lines by giving people tickets.
With number, you're on tender number five, you're on tender number six, and it really is a pain because again, you have to line up the day before to get your ticket number and then you were sort of sitting around because the tendering has begun and you're just sort of sitting around waiting for your tender.
Boat number to be called so that you can go and maybe stand in a shorter line. And the part that also really just irritates me is nine times outta 10, they don't even look at the ticket number. So I might be tender number 55 and decide like, I need to get off this boat and leave with the tender. Number 10, no one's looking, no one's checking.
So my own little pet peeve, but whatever. But when you're on a. Contemporary or premium line. Often in the higher suite classes comes priority tendering. We heard that about the Haven. You get priority tendering, sometimes you just meet your concierge or your butler and you meet in a central location.
They walk you down to the [00:15:00] tender boats. There's no line. The day before, you just get on the boat and you leave and it's a beautiful thing. And often it's early enough as we heard, like in Santorini, it's early enough before all of the crowds where you avoid the crowds, you're able to get to your location.
Without having to elbow your way through some, sometimes very, very busy ports. So I absolutely love priority tendering. Also priority debark, right? Priority embarkation, like, yes, that's really nice. But I think most cruise lines have pretty much got the embarkation. Down where it's relatively smooth.
It's rare that I hear about embarkation times that are, 45 minutes or an hour even on a contemporary cruise line. Usually there, unless you've got there really early and you have to wait for them to open the ship back up. For the embarking passengers, like most embarkation, iss pretty, smooth.
But debark it's just painful. I mean, you're sad [00:16:00] that the cruise is over. You probably had to wake up earlier than you have been getting up. For a week. If you're traveling with kids, you know, somebody in the group is uber crabby, so it's just deep arc is just painful. And then often, like some ships, it's been very smooth and you basically just keep walking and you walk right through.
But I have been on a number of ships lately where It's a crawl. It's a massive line of people, you know, five across, and it's just a crawl to get off the ship. And so to have priority demarcation, your luggage is in a specific place so you know it's gonna be there. Um, someone is a scoring you.
It's a really, really nice thing . That's my roundup of what I think are the most underappreciated perks of luxury cruising. We all know the food is fantastic, the service next level and the room is gonna be beautifully appointed. Those are all the big [00:17:00] things we think about and obviously the private spaces, the ship within a ship spaces, those are the big things we think about when it comes to luxury cruising.
But I think that these six.Perks that you get are really and truly underappreciated . So
If you experienced a perk while you were at luxury cruising that you didn't know about, that was a great surprise. I would love for you to put it in the comments or email me at. Luxury cruising podcast@gmail.com and I will let the audience know the next time on the next podcast. So thank you all, um, for being here and for listening.
As always, if you like the show please, I would so appreciate a review and or a follow. And until next time, I wish you safe and luxurious cruising .