CabinRate helps you find the best-value cruise by cutting through the headline fare to show what you’ll actually pay — and by scoring the itinerary on a consistent, transparent basis so you can compare very different trips at a glance.

Why CabinRate exists

Most cruise search tools sort by the lead-in fare. That number is the start of the bill, not the end: auto-gratuities are added at checkout, and drinks or Wi-Fi packages can cost as much as the fare itself. CabinRate shows the true all-in figure, breaks down every line’s fare bundles side by side, and tells you which is cheapest for your specific preferences — without ever collapsing price and itinerary quality into a single opaque score.

The two axes — kept separate by design

CabinRate scores every trip on two independent axes. They are never merged into one number, because a £500/night luxury all-inclusive is not objectively “better” than a £69 base fare — and neither should outrank the other.

1. Inclusiveness grade (A+–F)

Grades how much the fare bundles in, measured in estimated £ value per person per night across all included items:

• Gratuities — the line’s standard daily service charge, at the suite rate where applicable
• Drinks — imputed at the line’s own à-la-carte package price
• Wi-Fi — imputed at the line’s own connectivity rate
• Specialty dining — pro-rated across the cruise length
• Excursions and laundry — where bundled

The grade is entirely independent of price — it reflects inclusion depth only and plays no role in ranking.

2. Itinerary score (0–100)

Scores the trip across three transparent components, each shown as a bar so the result is never a black box:

• Destination appeal — an editorial prior for the cruise region, calibrated so that high-appeal destinations (Greek Isles, Norwegian Fjords, Alaska) score near the ceiling
• Port intensity — the proportion of days actually spent in port, judged against the norms for that cruise type — a transatlantic crossing is not penalised for sea days that are its whole point
• Trip length — how close the cruise length is to the ideal for its type (e.g. 7 nights for Caribbean, 13 for transatlantic)

Letter grades follow: A+ = 88+, A = 80, B = 72, C = 62, D = 50, E = 40, F below that.

Your personalised price

If you indicate you’ll use the drinks package or Wi-Fi, CabinRate adds the line’s own à-la-carte rate for any item your chosen bundle does not include. Where you have two passengers, add-on packages are always priced for both — because cruise lines require all cabin guests to participate.

What we cover

The calculator works entirely from user input and our hand-maintained inclusions database (the fare_bundles table, covering the major UK and international cruise lines). No live pricing feed is needed — you enter the fare you’ve been quoted and we apply the right bundle logic for that line.

Get in touch

Spotted an error, have feedback, or want to suggest a cruise line we should add? Email us at hello@cabinrate.com.