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.

Comparing cruises head to head

The head-to-head tool scores two to four cruises side by side using exactly the same calculations as the main calculator — there is one scoring routine, not a copy. Because cost and itinerary are separate axes, it never produces a single overall winner. Instead it names a leader on each axis, and calls it a toss-up when the difference is too small to mean anything:

• Cost — entries within 5% of the lowest true cost per night are a toss-up. Fares move by more than that day to day, and the add-on values are estimates.
• Itinerary — entries within 4 points (out of 100) of the highest score are a toss-up. Destination scores are editorial judgements, so a gap that small is noise.

If every cruise has the very same itinerary, we say so rather than calling it a toss-up — the scores are identical by construction, so the itinerary tells you nothing about how they differ. The inclusiveness grade is shown for each cruise but never decides a leader.

What would change a result

Where it’s useful, we show the one thing you could actually change — on its own, never a combination of tweaks:

• Price (head to head). On a cruise that isn’t the lowest-cost one, we show the fare at which it would become a toss-up on cost, and the fare at which it would lead outright. We find each by re-running the same scoring with only that cruise’s fare changed. Cuts of up to 15% are shown plainly, 15–30% are labelled a long shot, and anything deeper is left out rather than presented as realistic.
• Fare type (main calculator). For each richer fare bundle we show the most extra you could pay over the line’s base fare before the base becomes cheaper for you — counting your gratuities and any drinks or Wi-Fi you’ve said you’ll use.

We deliberately don’t test the itinerary (it’s fixed once you’ve chosen a cruise — changing it just describes a different cruise) or booking timing. We looked for evidence of a “best time to book” and found published data that disagrees with itself, so we don’t score it.

Our other tools

• Drinks calculator — weighs a line’s drinks package against paying as you go, using each line’s published package prices, cabin-purchase rules, and average drink prices that we maintain by hand.
• Which Line? and Where To? — short quizzes that match your answers to a cruise line or region. The matching is editorial: it reflects our own judgement, not a paid ranking.
• Loyalty tier check — shows how far you are from the next tier of a line’s loyalty programme, in whatever unit that programme actually uses (nights, points, cruises). Programme rules change, so each row records its source and when we last checked it.
• Tours & Activities and Excursion Cost Check — help you find and price independent tours through GetYourGuide. The excursion check shows the price difference and states plainly that a ship excursion guarantees the ship waits for you and an independent tour does not; it doesn’t declare a winner.

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.