- Beyond fares, we track the retail pricing of pre-cruise add-ons — shore excursions, dining, beverage, spa, internet, and private-island (CocoCay) products.
- Coverage runs across ~4.4M add-on price points captured daily: Royal + Celebrity via the shared Cruise Planner platform, and Carnival tracked separately.
- Onboard revenue is a major cruise yield lever — roughly a third of revenue — so add-on price levels and discount depth are a forward read on a line that earnings only confirm after the quarter.
- This is observed retail pricing, not realized onboard spend; we do not see what guests actually buy, only what each item is listed and discounted at.
A Second Pricing Surface
A cruise fare is not the whole ticket. By the time a guest boards, a large share of what they will pay has already been priced and, increasingly, pre-sold — drink packages, shore excursions, specialty dining, Wi-Fi, spa, and private-island day passes. That is the onboard revenue line, and it is roughly a third of a cruise operator's revenue. We track its retail pricing the same way we track fares.
This is a distinct surface from fares, with its own collection, its own catalog, and its own analytical use. The fare answers what a stateroom costs. The add-on layer answers how aggressively a line is pricing — and discounting — everything else.
This is observed retail pricing: the list price and current discounted price of each bookable add-on, by ship and sail date. It is not onboard spend — we do not see what guests actually buy. Read it as a pricing surface, the same way fare data is a pricing surface, not a booking ledger.
Why Onboard Pricing Is a Yield Lever
Cruise operators report yield as a blend of ticket revenue and onboard-and-other revenue. The onboard component is high-margin and, unlike the fare, it keeps selling right up to and during the voyage. Two structural facts make its pricing worth watching:
- It is a large slice of revenue. Onboard-and-other is broadly a third of the top line across the major operators — too big to model with the fare alone.
- It is increasingly pre-sold. Lines push pre-cruise booking of packages and excursions to lock in spend before departure, which means the prices and discounts are set — and observable — weeks or months ahead.
The fare tells you what the cabin costs. The add-on layer tells you how hard a line is pushing the rest of the ticket.
A line raising beverage-package list prices, or pulling back the depth of its pre-cruise discounts, is managing onboard yield — and that posture is visible in the catalog before it appears in a reported quarter.
What We Cover
Add-on pricing comes from two sources, mapped to public tickers.
| Source | Lines | Ticker | How it's collected |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cruise Planner | Royal Caribbean, Celebrity | RCL | Shared pre-cruise platform, captured together |
| Carnival catalog | Carnival Cruise Line | CCL | Separate source, captured on its own |
Royal Caribbean and Celebrity run the same pre-cruise booking system (Cruise Planner), so they are captured as one platform. Carnival's add-on catalog is structured differently and is collected separately. Both refresh daily.
Cruise Planner = Royal + Celebrity only. Carnival is a separate surface, not part of Cruise Planner. Other operators are not currently in the add-on layer — this is a narrower footprint than our 14-line, 203-ship fare coverage.
The Categories
On the Cruise Planner side, products resolve into eight categories. Shore excursions dominate by product count; beverage and dining dominate by the volume of repriced points, because they are priced per day or per seat across many sail dates.
| Category | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Shore excursions | Port tours and activities, by destination |
| Dining | Specialty restaurants and dining packages |
| Beverage | Drink packages and à-la-carte beverage |
| Spa | Treatments and thermal-suite passes |
| Internet | Wi-Fi / connectivity packages |
| Onboard | Onboard activities and experiences |
| CocoCay | Private-island day passes and add-ons |
| Key | Ship-access / amenity passes |
Carnival's catalog spans a similar spread — shore excursions, dining, beverage, Wi-Fi, photo, gifts, priority boarding, and onboard credit — collected under its own taxonomy rather than mapped onto the Cruise Planner categories. We hold the two structures separately rather than force a false one-to-one mapping.
What Each Price Point Carries
For every product, on every covered ship and sail date, a daily snapshot records both the list price and the live price, so discount depth is measurable rather than inferred.
- List / MSRP price
- The published reference price for the add-on
- Lowest / live price
- The current bookable price after any pre-cruise discount
- On-sale flag
- Whether the item is being discounted in this snapshot
- Sales unit
- How it's priced — per seat, per day, per package — which governs how prices can be compared
- Ship · sail date
- Every price is tied to a specific ship and departure, so it can be cohorted cleanly
Because each snapshot pairs the live price with the reference price, pre-cruise discount intensity is observable directly — the share of catalog on sale and how deep the markdowns run, by line and category.
A Read You Can't Get From the Fare
Two single-day reads from the current Cruise Planner snapshot show what the surface measures. The vast majority of the catalog was being discounted, at a meaningful average markdown — a promotional posture on onboard items that the fare alone would never reveal.
These are point-in-time snapshot figures, not period-over-period moves, so they are reported as levels. Tracked daily, the same two reads become a trend: a line letting its on-sale share drift up or its average markdown deepen is leaning harder on discounting to drive pre-cruise attach — the onboard analogue of fare promo intensity.
Add-ons are priced in different units — per seat, per day, per package — so a dining seat, a per-day drink package, and a multi-guest excursion are not directly comparable in dollars. Compare within a category and unit, or compare a category's level against its own history. Cross-category dollar comparisons are an apples-to-oranges trap.
A Worked Example
A simple illustration of why the add-on surface and the fare surface tell different stories.
A line holds cabin fares flat heading into a quarter, so the fare surface reads as stable yield.
The fare surface alone misses this entirely. The add-on surface shows the onboard lever moving.
The point is not the specific numbers; it is that onboard pricing can move independently of the fare, in either direction, and only a second surface captures it.
What It Can and Can't Tell You
- Tracking add-on list-price levels by line and category over time
- Measuring pre-cruise discount intensity — share on sale and markdown depth
- Reading the onboard yield posture ahead of a quarter, alongside fares
- Comparing RCL (Royal + Celebrity) vs CCL add-on pricing behavior
- Onboard spend — we observe prices, not what guests purchase
- Attach or take rates — no volume or booking data
- Lines outside Royal, Celebrity, and Carnival
- Cross-category dollar comparisons across different sales units
Like our fare data, this is a pricing surface. It is honest about its edges: it shows how add-ons are priced and discounted, not how much is bought.
Coverage and Freshness
The add-on layer is captured daily — each product repriced once a day across the covered ships, the same cadence as our fare data. As of June 2026 it spans roughly 4.4M price points: ~4.3M across Royal and Celebrity via Cruise Planner, plus Carnival's separately collected catalog. Sail-date coverage on the Cruise Planner side runs across 2026 departures.
This sits alongside, not inside, our fare coverage (203 ships, 14 cruise lines, 7M+ fare snapshots). The add-on footprint is deliberately narrower — three lines, two platforms — because that is where the pre-cruise pricing catalog is observable today.
We can scope a data pull around add-on pricing for specific lines, categories, or sail-date windows.
