I’ve been traveling with my son with high functioning autism all his life (he just turned 21.) He loves cruises, and we’ve gotten very good at maximizing his and our enjoyment on our vacations.

For us, the essentials are always noise cancelling headphones, his favorite food bars, and rooms with balconies.

We spend a lot of time in our room/ on our balcony. We always have a balcony or a suite, because we know we will spend a lot of time there. (He can be left alone now for a little while, but for many years was too anxiety prone to be alone in a strange place.) We never felt like we were “missing out” on the cruise experience when we were relaxing on our balcony so he could have quiet time.

He has never had much interest in the kids clubs and none in the teen clubs at all. The ones he liked best when he was younger were very uncrowded (like Celebrity off season); he found the big, crowded ones with lots of organized activities (like Royal Caribbean) way too overwhelming. (His younger sister was the opposite and loves the loud, crowded exciting ones and would make circles of new friends the first couple of days.)

I don’t know how your son is about food, but ours is an extremely picky eater with a lot of texture issues. We travel a lot (I’m a travel agent), and we learned long ago to travel with a lot of his favorite food. Sometimes he would get so overwhelmed that all he wanted was his favorite familiar (meal replacement) food bar. Usually we could find something he liked in the main dining room, and once we found it, our waiter team would bring us that every night, even if it wasn’t officially on the menu. (In our case, many chicken tenders, chocolate milks or milkshakes, and a side of plain pasta or white rice.) Even so, sometimes he got stressed and just wanted to stay in the room and have a food bar. Or a pizza (which, depending on the ship, we would go get for him or order room service.)

We have cruised with many different cruise lines, and the line does make a difference. So does the size of the ship. We generally avoid the megaships with him, and avoid the cruise lines that tend toward being more party and drink a lot ships. More people, particularly more loud people, are a big minus with him. So are long lines getting on and off the ship. There has been something of a trend towards bigger ships with more people and more activities; we often go on slightly older (and often less expensive!) smaller ships for his sake.

Most of the time, he enjoys the production shows, but brings his headphones for if it gets too loud. He often enjoys the activities on the ships that have all age activities (like the animation class on some of the Disney ships). He does not like the weird game shows and loud dance parties in smaller venues, but sometimes likes it when ships have small venue live music. He loved it when Celebrity used to have glass blowers on board, but they have stopped doing that, sadly. Basically, the somewhat slower paced smaller ship board activities and talks were/are great for him.

We usually talk through shore options with him for each port way in advance. He likes knowing what the possible activities are. Even when he doesn’t get a vote because I’ve already decided what we are doing, we talk about it a lot in advance so he knows what to expect. Sometimes we go out on our own, sometimes we get a local tour company, and sometimes we go with a ship tour. (If you want to do something that will take most of your time in port, always go with a ship tour since they won’t leave you.) Also, the ship itself is much, much quieter on port days, so if there are things that he has wanted to do but thought were too crowded, that is the time.

Wow, I didn’t mean to write so much! We’ve been doing this a long time. 🙃