Doesn’t every good vacation involve overindulgence in yummy drinks?! Especially when I am on a cruise, I need to order all the Margaritas and Strawberry Daiquiris my stomach can handle.
Nothing to me screams vacation more than sipping on a frozen drink on the side of the beach or pool.
So it comes as no surprise that one of the most popular extras purchased when taking a cruise is the infamous drink package. But is it worth it?
Let’s look at a Royal Caribbean cruise and do the math.
A drink package will run you between $63 and $89 depending on the type of cruise you are on. Expect to pay more during popular cruising times as well as if you are traveling on one of their newer ships.
Lets play fair and take the average and say that a drink package costs you around $76 per day plus a daily gratuity chare of 18%, putting your daily total around $90.
So now that we have the daily total worked out, let say you are going on a 7 day cruise, your total will be about $630 for the whole trip.
But there is a kicker, it only covers drinks $13 and under. So if you like an expensive wine or your liquor of choice is on the pricer side you can wind up paying the difference.
Additionally, EVERYONE in your cabin must have the same drink package. So in this example, the total cost per cabin is $1,260 before the cruise even started.
Now you may ask yourself, well how much do I need to drink per day to get my money’s worth? While drink packages cover alcohol and non-alcoholic drinks, for the sake of this analysis we will only look at alcoholic drinks.
Let’s look at the breakout
So to get your money’s worth you would need to drink 7 drinks a day. While most party goers don’t see that as a very difficult feat, you have to remember you are also on islands for at least half of your trip. So let’s see the cost breakout for a 7 day cruise, with 3 ports of call and 3 sea days.
So moral of the story, try to plan out how much drinking you will be doing while on board.
In this example it makes more sense to pay per drink because you spend a good chunk of time in port and by doing so you could save yourself around $135!