How CruiseIndex works

• Expert calibration. The backbone of the grade is anchored to decades of professional ship-inspection literature — expert ratings that score hundreds of vessels on consistent criteria — normalized against today's fleet. Ships too new to have been professionally rated are projected from their sister ships and clearly marked “projected.”
• The ship's bones. The scale of her facilities, space per passenger, and effective age — a 2004 hull with a 2024 refit is not a 20-year-old ship, and a never-refurbished 2015 ship is not young. (Crew-to-guest ratio is counted once, inside the service grade.)
• What passengers actually say. Aggregate category ratings — food, service, cabins, entertainment — compiled from thousands of traveler reviews across major cruise-review communities, including German-language communities for German-market lines. We use these to tell ships within a fleet apart; they never override the expert anchor across fleets, because a luxury-line “4 out of 5” and a budget-line “4 out of 5” answer different expectations.

Automatic penalties — not preferences

• Cleanliness. Government health-inspection scores (US CDC Vessel Sanitation Program) are baked in automatically. Nobody wants norovirus; repeat offenders get flagged, not hidden.
• Incident history. Fires, breakdowns, groundings from the public record — weighted by severity and recency. A 2009 propulsion hiccup is noise; a recent major incident costs real points and earns a badge.

When we don't know, we say so

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 Great service Lots to do New ship Just refreshed Adults-only Great for families Loved by travelers Spacious 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.

• 5.0 — fairly priced for what it is
• 7.5+ — a good deal; genuinely better than the market
• 9.0+ — rare; book-it-before-it's-gone territory

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.

• Cabin-level truth. Scores describe the ship, not whether cabin 7214 is under the basketball court. Cabin-grade data comes with live inventory.
• This week's reality. A beloved chef leaves, a crew rotates — aggregate data moves slower than gossip. We refresh review aggregates quarterly, inspections monthly, and fares daily once the live feed is on.
• Your taste. Tags can find the ships with great food, but they can't know you hate sea days. Read the itinerary; tap the ports.

• No gating. Every price links straight out to where you can book it. No “call us for the price.” No paywall on the score.
• Derived, not copied. We compute our own scores from aggregate signals. We don't republish anyone's reviews or proprietary ratings.
• Advisories, not hiding. Hurricane-season sailings get a badge, not a buried listing — flexibility is priced in, and you deserve to know why it's cheap.
• Versioned methodology. When the blend changes, this page changes, and “why did my score move?” always has an answer.