What’s that “free”perk actually worth?
“Drinks included”, “free gratuities” — cruise lines rarely put a number on it. Here’s what each perk is really worth in pounds.
The trouble with “free”
Almost every cruise offer today comes wrapped in perks — free drinks, free gratuities, free WiFi, a free hotel night before you sail. It sounds generous, and sometimes it genuinely is. But “free” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and two quotes that both say “drinks included” can be worth wildly different amounts.
Some cruise lines bake standard drinks and tips into every single fare, with nothing separate to buy at all — for them, “included” is just describing the normal price, not a discount. Others charge a genuine daily package on top, worth anywhere from under £30 to nearly £90 per person, per night depending on the line and tier. Say the same word, “included,” and mean two completely different things.
The headline “value” a cruise line quotes for its perk bundle — “worth over £1,000!” — is usually the full retail price of buying every perk separately at its most expensive tier, not what an average cruiser would actually spend. It’s real in the sense that the number isn’t made up, but it’s not a useful basis for comparing one quote against another.
And a few perks marketed just as prominently — a cabin upgrade, a future cruise credit, a bump up a loyalty tier — are worth precisely nothing in cash terms. They’re nice bonuses, but none of them reduce what you’re actually paying for the holiday in front of you.
That’s what this page is for: real, researched £ figures for what each perk is typically worth, cruise line by cruise line where it varies, so you can see past the marketing and compare offers on equal footing — the same honest math our Deal Checker uses to check a full quote.
Figures are reviewed regularly but can change — always confirm the exact perk with your cruise line or agent.
About these figures
No black box — here's exactly where the numbers come from.
Because cruise lines build "included" differently into their fares. Some fold standard drinks and gratuities into every fare as standard, so there's genuinely nothing separate to credit — that's an honest £0, not a missing figure. Others sell a real, priced daily package on top of the fare, and that's what varies most, from under £30 to nearly £90 per person, per night.
Each cruise line's own published pricing, researched directly from their site or FAQ rather than third-party guesses. Where a figure genuinely varies by cruise line (drinks, gratuities) we show the real per-line number; where it doesn't (a hotel night, port parking, flights) it's the same estimate everywhere, because it depends on the port or destination, not which cruise line you've booked.
These are the same live figures used by our Deal Checker, checked automatically once a month against each cruise line's current published pricing so they don't quietly go stale.
No — it's deliberate. A handful of cruise lines genuinely include drinks and/or gratuities in every fare with nothing separate to buy, so crediting a made-up value on top would double-count something you're already paying for in the base price.
Use the calculator above to see roughly what your quoted perks are worth, then head to our Deal Checker to check your actual quote against live tracked prices — it uses these exact same figures.