Cruise holidays are increasingly popular but they’re not getting any easier to book. Cruise expert Gary Bembridge highlights how there are myriad “tricks, traps, and mistakes to avoid” when you’re booking yourself a cruise.
In his latest Tips for Travellers video, Gary focuses on drinks packages, which he points out can add as much as $1,000 (about £800) to the cost of your holiday. But do you need one? There’s a complex set of calculations to work that out.
If you get your maths right, Gary says, you can save 20% over paying for your drinks as you go. He explained how he advised a friend on how to decide whether or not to plump for a drinks package – and which one to go for from the dizzying range available.
The question is even more puzzling because of the rules governing drinks packages – except in special cases every adult in a party has to select the same one. Clearly the lines want to insure themselves against canny travellers sharing one package between them.
Gary spoke to his pal and helped him work out roughly how much he expected to drink in a average day: “They are going on a port-intensive Western Mediterranean cruise with just one sea day,” Gary explained. “They will be doing seven to nine-hour excursions to Rome, Florence and Cinque Terre.”
Frequent off-ship excursions, he says, mean less time spent in the shipboard bars: “If they were going on a repositioning cruise with mostly sea days,” he says,“they may end up drinking and using the drinks package more.”
After extensive calculations, Gary decides that in his pal’s case, plumping for a drinks package was the right move and urged them to make sure they got their money’s worth out of the package.
“I wasn’t encouraging them to get drunk and do it to excess every day,” he stressed, “ but like most cruisers he was focusing on the alcoholic drinks side of the package.
“I reminded him he could get bottled sodas, energy drinks, specialty teas and coffees, smoothies, bottles of water, hot chocolates, and fancy coffees after dinner like Irish coffee, so to get the most I suggested he makes sure to use the full range of the package.”
Gary concluded by saying that it’s a good idea to book your drinks package in advance, “and not get trapped into paying more once on board.”