Cruise price comparison tool: what two cruises really cost

Often by far less than the fare suggests. A low headline fare usually leaves gratuities, Wi-Fi and a drinks package still to pay, while a luxury fare folds them in. Once you add those to both sides, CruiseClarify finds a fare that looked twice the price can land within a few hundred dollars all-in. The tool above lets you test it for any two lines.

Cruise fare and taxes & port fees (you enter these — same per-person or cabin-total fare basis as the calculator, with port fees per person; tick the box on a side if that fare already includes taxes and port fees), plus the typical onboard extras — gratuities, a standard Wi-Fi plan and a mainstream drinks package — scaled to your nights and party size and priced from the same commercial data as the calculator. Where a fare package covers something outright, Compare counts it as covered, so a total here can sit below our onboard cost reference, which prices every extra separately. Travel costs — flights, hotels, transfers and insurance — are added on top. They are shared across both cruises by default, and entered separately for each when you tick that the two trips differ, since two cruises leaving from different ports rarely cost the same to reach.

Every cruise-line figure behind this comparison is published as an open dataset. The same numbers are on GitHub and Hugging Face in CSV and JSON, free to download and check under a CC BY 4.0 licence — so you do not have to take our total on trust.

Norwegian's drinks package is usually "free" under its Free at Sea promotion — but the roughly $28.50 per person, per day service charge on that package is still charged. That charge is not a gratuity — daily gratuities are separate, and shown on their own line. So the figure shown is what you actually pay, not the full retail package price. Lines without a free-drinks promotion show the price you'd pay for the package itself, which is why their numbers look higher.

Yes. On each card, choose the fare package — Princess Plus / Premier, Have It All, or Windstar’s All-Inclusive — and Compare prices it from the same commercial data as the calculator. Leave “No fare bundle” selected to price typical standalone drinks, Wi-Fi and gratuities separately. Fare, guests, nights and tax treatment already use the same rules as the calculator. When a path still isn’t like-for-like (for example Virgin’s Bar Tab, or a premium-fare drinks upgrade on Viking/Azamara), a notice appears above the comparison result.

No — they're typical, mid-tier figures for a like-for-like comparison, refreshed every few months. Real prices move with the season, itinerary, cabin and any promotion running at the time. Use the result to see how the gap between two cruises changes once everything is counted, then confirm the current numbers with the cruise line before you book.