I recently saw a discussion taking place on Twitter where a couple who’d never cruised before responded to someone saying they’d found a great price for a cruise with the question: What is a good cruise price?
It’s a question that a lot of seasoned cruisers will probably ask themselves too quite often – I know we do – but it’s especially important to a cruise virgin. The only problem is that there’s no definite answer here. Part of the reason I didn’t reply to the original question was because there would be every chance that what I would consider a good price, something making a cruise value for money in my eyes, might be inconsequential to the decision-making process of somebody else. If you’ve ever browsed a Facebook cruise group where one person asks a question then you’ll have seen the dozens of conflicting answers received and while travel Twitter is a less confrontational place it’s not somewhere I wanted to visit. My site, however, is a different matter and I see no reason to not share what goes through our heads when we price up cruise holidays and work out if we’d be getting a good deal.
Cruise Prices Versus Hotel Prices
You can’t truly tell whether the worth of something is good or not unless you’ve got something with which to compare it. We compare cruise prices with hotel prices in the first instance, always calculating on a price per person per day basis. Cruises are typically priced per person; hotels are typically priced per room; double the first number or halve the second. You can’t just compare a cruise against a cheap hotel, though; you’ve got to compare as much as you can on a like-for-like basis. For the ships we cruise on we have a fairly good idea about the type of room we’ll be aiming for so the type of hotel we need to use as a comparison will be a hotel with a sea view and pretty modern amenities in a smallish room. Other elements then come into play because that hotel needs a pool and must include breakfast.
A quick search now on a popular hotel-booking website shows a Saturday night in Brighton, in six months, with a sea view and pool and with breakfast included rocks in at around £200 for the room.
It’s unusual to not be able to eat around the clock for free on a cruise ship; certainly the ones we cruise with allow that. So, we have to factor in a lunch and a three-course dinner plus occasional snacks for two people on top of that room price. Based on our experience of what we’d pay on land to eat the type and quality of food we get on cruise ships I’d estimate that’s another £40 each.
Then there’s the entertainment to account for. Admittedly, we don’t tend to see many shows but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to allow at least a tenner each per night for the comedy or musical acts that perform.
Our total hotel figure, then, is about £300 per night, or £150 per person per pay. There’s still more to account for – access to a gym; access to childcare facilities; daily programmes of exercise classes, group activities, seminars, quizzes – and then there’s the almost-impossible-to-put-a-price-on value that comes with a hotel that moves, changes view every day, and allows you to visit somewhere new. What is that worth when factoring it into a cruise price?
We add in that almost intangible quality and then we add in the daily gratuities. Gratuities are sometimes absorbed by the cruise line in the price but chances are good that’s because the base price is inflated to compensate for it. Gratuities are sometimes removable but we don’t so that’s a moot point here. Adding it all together the target figure we come out with is about £180 per person per day. That’s for a balcony cabin on the sort of ship we’ve become accustomed to. If we look at the price for a cruise and it’s in that ballpark then we’re interested; if it’s lower then we’re very interested; if it’s significantly lower then we’re very interested but very aware we’re probably going to get poorer quality and service or get hit somewhere else; higher than that means we have to take other things into consideration.
Sea Days On Cruises
We like a sea day. I’d even say we love a sea day. But a sea day is worth less than a port day. There are obvious economical benefits to the cruise lines because the ship isn’t paying port fees and can probably cruise along at an efficient speed for its engines. In addition, the cruise ship will have a captive audience for its bars and speciality dining venues and spas and shops. There may even be tax benefits to being in international waters to consider.
How you feel about a sea day as opposed to a port day may change as you become more experienced with cruising or if you’re heading somewhere you’ve been before. For us, right now, we think of sea days as being worth about 60% of a port day so a fortnight’s cruise with nine sea days should be a decent chunk cheaper than one with six. The cruise lines obviously think along similar lines and you’ll find port-heavy cruises more expensive than sea-heavy ones; transatlantic or repositioning cruises, for instance, are often very good value as a result.
Cruise Destination Effect On Price
This one should be obvious but where a ship cruises can have a big effect on the price. When it cruises can make a difference too. It’s no different from a land-based holiday where you’d expect to pay more for a hotel in Brighton than you would Blackpool as one of those places is just truly awful and you’d pay more for a Satuday in the middle of summer than you would a Wednesday in the depths of November. These things have to be factored into any cruising decisions. Desirability costs. What do you desire from a cruise? Is this a place you really, really want to see? What price do you put on that desirability? It’s a tricky one to come up with a hard and fast rule but when we’re looking to see what sort of value we can get from cruises we either start with a destination in mind or a timeframe in which we want to travel. Both can have a huge impact on how much that daily cost comes to especially when you look outside those ranges you’re first interested in.
A very big consideration related to the destination is simply: How are you going to get there and back?
We’re lucky in that we live only half an hour’s drive from a busy cruise port in England. That has started to come more into play when we’re weighing up cruises as Europe is a destination we’ve overlooked more than you might think; the reason being we’ve tried to favour different cultures and more remote locations while we’re still capable of dealing with long-haul flights. We still have to add in parking our car into the total cost of the cruise package although some cruise lines throw this in for free for certain types or durations of cruises.
If we need to fly, though, then we’re probably looking at a trip to London. That means adding in parking costs, transfers when we land, and possibly including a hotel stay if the flight we’ll need is early and we don’t want to stress ourselves out too much. Of course, there’s also the price of the flight to include. With some travel agents you can find this is already included in the package that first catches your eye. When booking direct it’s sometimes possible to get a deal where flights are thrown in for free and we’ve certainly taken advantage of this offer on more than one occasion.
The Value Of Included Perks
Sometimes we’ll find a cruise deal that comes with some freebies thrown in – free flights, a free speciality meal, some money to spend onboard or on excursions – and we factor that into the overall figure. On our last cruise to South America we had a free speciality meal, a free bottle of wine, a free excursion, and onboard credit. On an upcoming cruise to the Mediterranean we’re getting the flights and transfers for free. These things definitely influence our decision to choose a cruise because they typically turn a reasonable price for a cruise into a good one.
On some cruise lines or for special promotions drinks are included. If you drink then this can really be a big saving. We drink. People who know us know this. The average price of cocktails when we cruise is about £7. On a sea day we might have 7 or 8 drinks. On a port day that could be as low as 3. On a typical cruise this averages out around 5. It’s for this reason that a drinks package which only is cost-effective after 8 drinks per day (Princess, I’m looking at you) is something we would never buy. But a package of included drinks could easily be worth a saving of £30 per person per day for us averaged out over a cruise.
Cruise Ship Features
Does having a slide on a ship make a difference to you? Zip-wires? Go-karts? Some virtual reality thing? If one cruise ship has those features and another one doesn’t and they both go to the same places then how much is a good price to pay each day for those features? Could you live without them and save money? We can definitely live without them.
The Size And Age Of The Ship
The size and age of the cruise ship can make a difference to the price but there’s a balancing act still. Older ships tend to be smaller anyway and fewer passengers on a ship typically mean a premium to pay. Add to that a more inefficient engine design with higher fuel costs and it should make sense that going for a larger, newer ship would clearly lead to a better value cruise.
Not so fast. If you start to break down the price per person per day then the ships of around 6-15 years of age and capacity of around 2500-3000 passengers end up being the best value for cruises. Smaller and/or older than that and the ships are either holding onto a loyal base that can be charged more or they cost more to run and need to charge more. The newer megaships were touted as being more efficient and you would think that with more fuel efficiency and a higher number of passengers aboard the price would come down just through economies of scale. But no. Strangely. We’ve found that they tend to be as much if not more than the older ships. You’ll have to make your own mind up about why that might be.
What Is A Good Cruise Price For Us?
Those are our general guidelines but what would we actually consider a good cruise price? As you can probably already guess there’s no single answer but I can look at cruises we’ve booked and thoughts going through our heads regarding future cruises to try to give more of an answer.
Our baseline for now, as I’ve already said, is £180 per person per day. At £200 or above it would have to have some spectacular perks or a destination to make it worthwhile in our minds. We don’t tend to factor in flights unless they’re free or discounted when that cruise becomes more desirable or there becomes more upwards flexibility in that average price.
We only do balconies now because we like the proximity to the sea, reading a book in peace, waking up to that view. We have done a sea view cruise because the ship we were on only had a few balconies and they were far too expensive; that cruise was more about the experience of the ship than anything else, though, so it was worth “slumming it” for once. We paid less than we would pay for a balcony typically for that trip so the price was about right.
Later this year we’re cruising with Marella through the Suez Canal to Jordan. That cruise will be in a balcony cabin and will cost about £130 per person per day. That’s a good price for a cruise but there are a lot of sea days there which brings the price down to a reasonable one. Except that it also includes the flights and transfers and drinks. That’s back to being an excellent price for the cruise.
Some of the luxury cruise lines or river cruise companies have at first glance horrifically high prices when compared to the sorts of cruises we tend to prefer. However, it is definitely worth delving into them to see exactly what’s included in that price. While we still consider some of the lines out there to be overpriced for what is effectively just a more genteel version of cruises we take now we have started to seriously look at some that have included flights, transfers, drinks, all speciality dining, all excursions, and that extra je ne sais quoi because of the destination, and all for perhaps only a little more than we’re used to spending now. It’s more money upfront but then less upon our return. We haven’t booked anything yet but it’s not entirely impossible that it’s only a matter of time.