Headed on a Disney Cruise? Don’t forget to sign up for a fish extender group and make these cute fish extender gifts, Disney Cruise survival kits! They’ll be the gifts that everyone will remember when you get off the ship at the end of the cruise! They’re simple, inexpensive, and great for all ages!
What is a Disney Fish Extender?
In the past year my family has been on two Disney cruises – one on the Disney Wonder and one of the Disney Dream. The second cruise was part of the Disney Social Media Moms Celebration and totally different than the first, but both were amazing in their own ways.
One of the things that we participated in on the Disney Wonder cruise was fish extenders – basically like a secret Santa, except not so secret, among families on the cruise. You can sign up for the dates you are sailing, get put into groups, and then give the other families in your group small gifts on the cruise. People hang up “fish extenders” or decorated mailboxes on their cruise doors to receive gifts and notes from other cruisers.
It’s pretty awesome and one of my son’s absolute favorite parts of Disney cruises. Disney is the only cruise line I’ve ever seen that does anything like this, and it’s a great way to add even more magic to your trip! This is a really high level look at the Disney Cruise fish extenders, but you can get more detailed info in this guide to Disney fish extenders!
We used this Etsy shop to have a custom Disney cruise fish extender put together for our trip and this shop to get custom magnets (the doors are magnetic) with our names on it for door decorations. Both were high-quality and turned around the custom items very fast! I love our Marvel superhero themed door!
Disney Cruise Fish Extender Gifts: Cruise Survival Kits
For our Disney Wonder cruise back in February, I put together these cute little Disney Cruise survival kits customized to the different families in our group. I went a little crazy because I knew a lot of the families in our group (all part of Disney Moms), but you could easily do this same idea and just simplify it a bit if you don’t want to spend as much money per family.
I started each survival kit off with one of these Mickey drawstring bags. Each set comes with one gold and one silver bag, and it was the perfect place to put all of items in the survival kits!
Each family had a different mix of adults, kids, grandparents, etc. so I customized each tag and the items inside the bag based on the family members. Here’s a list of all of the different things I put into the survival kits along with their sayings! You could honestly probably just give any of these items as your entire gift, but I thought it would be fun to do a family gift + individual gifts because well, that’s just what I do.
You can click on the links below to see the actual items I ordered, I went with reasonably priced but not terrible quality. And a lot of these things, I bought on sale over the course of the year since we knew we were going on the cruise for a few months ahead of time!
- Movie night snacks and treats (for everyone to eat while they’re watching movies or main theater shows)
- Minnie socks – “To keep you cozy during your Minnie adventures” (for mom)
- Men’s Star Wars socks – “To help you put your best foot forward all week long (for Dad)
- Disney magnet – “To help all your memories stick with you” (for grandma or grandpa)
- Notebook with favorite princess quote on it – “For the write time with your favorite character” (kids)
- Disney Tsum Tsums – “To help keep the trip from tsuming by” (kids)
- Star Wars Legos – “To keep the force with you at all times” (kids)
Printable Tags for Fish Extender Gifts
Since I can’t customize these tags specific per family for you, I put together the next best thing – I created the images for each line on the tag that you can download and add to your own tags. When you download the files, there will be a header tag, a footer tag, and then all of the different “item” tags. Download the ones you want and insert them into word, illustrator, or any other program that accepts images to customize the tags for the families in your group. If you questions or get stuck, feel free to email me.
To get the different downloadable images simply click the “click to print” button below. Go through the free checkout process and once you checkout, it’ll give you links to download for the different tags. Enjoy!
Other Disney Cruise Fish Extender Gift Ideas
To give you an idea of fish extender gift ideas, here are some of the other items our family received. These weren’t all of them, but this gives you a quick idea. Most people either did one individual family gift or an individual family gift + a gift for my son, which was really appreciated. He loved getting happy mail each day! And if this isn’t enough ideas, here are 50 other awesome fish extender ideas that I know my family would love to get!
Don’t forget to pin these Disney fish extender gifts for later!
More Tips for Disney Cruises
This is awesome. We did our first Disney Cruise over New Years this year on the Wonder. We were clueless to all of this stuff. We have two cruises lined up next summer and will be definitely doing some of this stuff.
Going on a Disney Cruise is totally on our family bucket list!!