You shouldn't need three browser tabs, a forum deep-dive, and a spreadsheet to know whether a cruise is worth booking. We did that work already. This page explains exactly how, because a score you can't interrogate is just marketing.
Every ship is graded out of six stars. Stars judge the vessel itself: how good is the experience on board, regardless of what any particular sailing costs?
The average rating from people who actually sailed, with the number of reviews behind it shown honestly. A bare average without its sample size is a bluff.
Every sailing gets a Value Score out of 10: how much ship you get per dollar, ranked against genuinely comparable cruises — same cabin type, same region, same length. 5.0 is the going rate for that much cruise; above it the fare beats the going rate, below it it does not. A 9 or better is rare by design. Quality counts the ship and the passenger reviews together, so a well reviewed ship is worth more per dollar than an identically specced one people did not enjoy.
Two things follow from that, and both are deliberate. A better ship at the same price always scores higher, and the same ship for less always scores higher, because the number is simply cost divided by quality. And the comparison is always like for like: ranking every cruise on earth by cost per star would just list the cheapest, since prices vary about twice as much as quality does. Seabourn would lose to a discount sailing every time, which tells you nothing.
Three numbers, weighted in the open. Every one is published by the cruise line itself, so you can check our arithmetic against a brochure.
| 50% | Space per guest. Gross tonnage divided by guests. Roughly 25 tons each at the crowded end, 75 and up at the generous end. The single hardest thing for a ship to fake, because it is fixed in steel. |
| 30% | Guests per crew member. Between about 1.3 and 3.7. It is the closest honest proxy for how much attention there is to go round, and unlike opinions about service it is a headcount. |
| 20% | Condition. Age, with a refit counted as erasing half a ship's years, not all of them. A 1996 hull refitted last year is not a one-year-old ship, and a never-refurbished 2015 ship is not young. Announced future refits do not count until they happen. |
Where a figure is genuinely unavailable, the remaining terms are re-weighted rather than the missing one being scored as zero.
Two reasons, and we would rather show our working than assert a number.
What a refit costs. Royal Caribbean’s Amplified programme ran about 15% of a ship’s original build price — $120m on Mariner of the Seas against $650m to build her, $116m on Freedom against $800m. Allow for inflation between a 2003 build and a 2018 refit, and for the roughly half of any new ship that is hull and machinery no passenger ever sees, and a refit buys something like a quarter to a third of the part you actually experience.
What a refit changes. When Ovation of the Seas went into dry dock, the venues were swapped inside the rooms that already existed: one restaurant became another, the casino spread into the old music hall, and forty new cabins were cut out of a fitness centre and some technical space. Everything a guest touches was renewed. Nothing a guest moves through changed. Cabin dimensions, ceiling heights and deck geometry are fixed in steel on the day a ship is built and stay that way for her whole life.
Cost alone would argue for less than half. Scope argues for more, because recarpeting a room costs a fraction of building it. Half is where we landed, and it is a judgement, so it is written here rather than hidden.
One consequence worth naming: a refit can make a ship worse. Ovation gained forty cabins without gaining a single ton, so every guest aboard now has slightly less ship to themselves. That shows up as a loss on space per guest even as the ship gains on condition, which is the right answer.
Thin data shrinks a ship's grade toward the fleet middle rather than bluffing confidence, and shows an “est.” or “ltd data” badge. A score without error bars is a guess in a suit.
The Vessel Class grade is fixed and objective: you can't bend it, and neither can we. Instead, every sailing earns descriptive tags from its own data, and you filter by them:
Great food Recently refreshed Adults-only Great for families Ultra-luxury
A tag has a threshold behind it: “Great food” means the ship's food signal clears a fixed bar, not that a marketer chose an adjective. Pick any tags; a sailing must carry all of them to stay on your list.
The trap in “value” scores: luxury prices grow much faster than quality. The step from a great ship to the absolute best of the best can cost 2–3× more. Rank every sailing by simple price-per-quality and the finest ships in the world sink to the bottom of the list forever, which tells you nothing.
So we price every sailing against a fair price for its own class: what comparable sailings (same class of ship, similar length, similar season) actually cost right now. The Value Score measures how far below (or above) that fair price this sailing sits. A six-star ship at a five-star price scores high. A mid ship at a luxury price scores low.
Traveler reviews give the deal a gentle nudge: a ship people love is worth a little more at the same price, a ship people pan a little less. The nudge is capped small; price stays the driver.
Price never touches the stars. A discount doesn't make a ship better; it makes a deal better. And a sailing that is both better and cheaper than another can never score below it.
Sources, in general terms: shipbuilder and fleet registry data (tonnage, guest capacity, crew complement, build and refit years — the three inputs to the Vessel Class); US CDC Vessel Sanitation Program (public inspection data); public incident records including Wikipedia-sourced event histories; aggregate traveler ratings from major cruise-review communities, shown as their own figures rather than folded into a grade; professional ship-inspection literature, used privately to sanity-check the formula and never published as a score. Sanitation data courtesy of the CDC VSP; scores are public records; interpretation is ours.
CruiseIndex links to cruise lines and travel agencies and may earn a commission when you book through those links; it never changes a score, a rank, or a fair price. Full affiliate disclosure · Privacy policy.
About the fares. Every price shown is a real fare, not an estimate. Illustrative sample fares were switched off entirely: a sailing we cannot price carries no price. Fares come from CruiseDirect, the same page the booking link sends you to, so the number on the card is the number at checkout. A handful of sailings carry a fare that is some weeks old and are labelled as such.