Why you should always book a cruise on Thursdays

You might want to consider what day of the week to search for cruises, says cruisewatch.com, a search engine for cruise price drop. According to an elaborate study that took into consideration more than 600,000 data points, cruise prices drop lowest in the middle of the week with Thursday seeing most discounts.

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Most talked about ships in April 2016 and other stats

April was a busy month again for cruise ship reviews with 2.626 customer reviews posted on the web. There has been quite some movement in the top 10 of most reviewed ships. We have counted reviews across major customer sites all around the web, and found some interesting statistics for you.

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Where are the cruise ships now?

Where are the cruise ships now? Our daily map update shows the location of all major cruise ships.

location-cruiseshipsDid you ever wonder where the cruise ships are located right now? We did some research and created a handy google maps page that show the location of all know cruise ships today.

Our map is getting updated through two sources:

  1. We are using our extensive itinerary data to look up planned cruise stops for all major ships.
  2. We are parsing automated ship position reports for those ships that are at sea.

Check it out:

Show location of all cruise ships

Historic Cruise Pricing Overview

Looking at the past can tell us quite a bit about the future. For example about the best time to book that cruise.

Thistoric cruise pricinghe chart on the right hand side shows you the historic pricing for oceanview cabins on Celebrity Eclipse. You can see how the pricing changes over time with the left hand side of the graph showing 600 days before departure and the right hand side being departure day.

We have normalized all pricing at 100 so that you can see price drops and hikes. The orange line is the average pricing line with the other lines showing statistical boundaries.

In this example, the pricing trend is generally upwards in the beginning with moderate increases of about 3%. Price reductions start about 60 days before departure with the lowest pricing around 40 days.

Of course, this is just the average. Cruise pricing will always be impacted by individual demand and supply. As you can see, there are sailings that have significant price increases fairly early. Such sailings are typically in high demand seasons (such as public holidays). And there is also a very active last minute season with strong pricing drops about 90 to 25 days before departure (red line).

Keep this in mind when looking at current cruise prices and check out the pricing history of the ship you are interested in. To do this, browse through the cruise lines, pick a ship, click on “analytics” and then choose a cabin type. Happy savings!

Browse Cruise Lines

Free instant cruise price alert

Cruise prices fluctuate with demand and supply. You can save quite a bit of money when booking at the right time. We will help you find that right time.

cruise price alertOur free monitoring engine keeps track of cruise pricing for thousands of sailings in the upcoming months. Now you can use that knowledge to your advantage.

  1. Never miss that sale or promotion again. We will notify you immediately when the prices drop.
  2. Even if you have booked before it pays to know about price reductions. Talk to your travel agent or cruise lines. Oftentimes they will offer you either a refund or some kind of benefits when prices drop significantly.

Using our monitoring service is free and simple. All you need to do is sign up. There are two types of alerts that we sending out right now, and we will be adding more features soon. The easiest alert is our general daily price drop information email. It is just one email containing the most relevant price changes for the day (across all monitored cruises).

You can also select specific departures on our site and enable notifications for these. You will then only get an email when the price of your selected cruise has been changed.

You can view all price changes in the last 24 hours on our special cruise price drop page.

Sign up for free cruise price alerts

How I used big data and machine learning to find good deals on cruises.

Cruise prices change every day. If you book at the right time you can save 40% or more. Having done 20+ cruises myself it became obvious that technology could help me save big $$$s on cruises if employed correctly. That’s why I hacked cruisewatch together – a website that uses big data and machine learning to identify price drops and good deals on cruises.

Continue reading “How I used big data and machine learning to find good deals on cruises.”