Are all-inclusive drinks ALL they are cracked up to be?

I have only ever had a half/full board basis once in my life outside of a cruise and it was a bit of a disaster food wise. This was on the Costa Brava in Spain, the hotel rate was so cheap to have half board it would have been silly not to, something like £6 more person for our stay, so I just went with it. We ended up not eating in the hotel restaurant much for the 4 days we were there, mainly because of quality. Price wise there was no complaint, but value wise we were paying for a service we weren’t using, that’s just me being tight-fisted I guess but true story!…

Generally on a cruise the standard of food is exceptional and this is never a problem and it is great value as cruises are almost always full board as standard. With an all inclusive drinks package though is this the case?

Perhaps people are overpaying and are just being swept along by clever marketing and what is easy. The question must be, is what you are buying as good value as you think?

I recently worked out the price of drinks for a customers cruise, done on an adhoc basis versus a drinks package for the customer and the results were surprising. The drinks package in total would have worked out at $58 per person per day, including the service charge.

Basically each person would have had to drink 8 standard beers/glasses of wine a day plus 2-3 soft drinks to make the all inclusive drinks worthwhile against the equivalent of just doing it one by one. Call me lightweight but personally I couldn’t consider drinking that much alcohol every day for a week and enjoying my holiday fully. Also a lot (not all) cruise lines have places you can go to get water and refreshments without paying top dollar at the bar for too. Did you know P&O allow you to bring alcohol on-board to drink, just in the cabin, they will even bring you ice if you request it?

Generally speaking there is always a cost for everything and even the “free” drinks packages always have some sort of string attached, eg you would have to have an outside cabin or above and so on.

Everyone is different I guess and if getting your monies worth means downing 8-9 pints every night then fair enough if you can manage it but I for one wouldn’t. I dont think I would feel good about it the next day either….

I would also question the need to be paying a set amount a day for something which isn’t actually tangible or consistent. Some days you might want to have a massive night and drink 12 pints, the next day you might be hungover and not want to drink anything (me after 8 pints).

To avoid generalisations it must be pointed out that certain cruise lines, even currently, have some fantastic offers on all inclusive drinks. Thomson’s for example are offering free upgrades to all inclusive on some of their cruises at the moment. Another one which is good is MSC, they tend to work out about £150 per person per week in the med for a drinks package so approx £20 a day, pretty reasonable all things considered. NCL have gone totally all inclusive, the question I would have about this is, are they actually cheaper since they have done this and what about the people who don’t want to be all inclusive, what incentive do they have to actually book especially if they are tee total?

Its when you start paying $50 a day (and that’s not including service charges on some cruise lines) that I would question the value.