One of the questions I get asked on a regular basis as a seller of cruises is “is the drinks package included?”. Up until now with some cruise-lines, the answer has been easy, as some cruise lines such as P&O & Cunard haven’t been offering them at all but are now starting to get into the mix.
Other cruise lines them offer drinks packages as part of a “free” drinks package promotion. This particular marketing is perhaps slightly misleading as the drinks package is “included” in the price but is it actually “free”? 
If you look at a cruise line’s previous promotion (which will have ended at that time and probably would have included onboard credit or parking? ) without a drinks package, the price is almost to the pound the same roughly as if you purchase the drinks package on top of the previous lower fare anyway!!? So it’s not really free if you think about it. Are you following so far?
Some cruise lines (NCL and Royal Caribbean to name two) also run a parallel promotion next to their drink package one which offers a cheaper price with some drawbacks like not being able to pick a specific cabin. Interestingly 9 times out of 10 if you look at this pound for pound it is almost always exactly the same cost difference of adding the drink package on. So these businesses factor all these costs in and are ruthlessly efficient in balancing their costs and profiting. 
Right, so what is in it for you and what is in it for the cruise line? Well, the good news is that often these drinks packages include just about every type of drink you could think of all for the price of roughly £40 per person a day plus tax (or £330 per person for a 7-night cruise). They are however normally limited to 15 ish drinks a day which if you are off enjoying the cultural sites in port all day might be a bit hard to max out of an evening.
This useful Drinks package calculator is fairly accurate if you look at average prices onboard and when you compare my general estimate for myself of drinking perhaps 3 beers and 5 soft drinks a day (taking into account going ashore for port days) it is over half the cost of what it would be for myself in comparison to what the package actually costs per day.
Remember you would have to do drink that amount every single day to make it worthwhile as well…
If you add a few cocktails and glasses of wine to the mix however it does start to resemble that price a bit quicker. As a non-cocktail drinker that wouldn’t work for me and personally, I wouldn’t enjoy exploring the wonders of Rome for example after 7 or 8 glasses of wine the night before.
Another thing cruise lines don’t really advertise is the amount of “real” free drinks that you have at your disposal onboard. To some extent, they all offer self-service juice and tea and coffee, except you may have to walk a little to one of the restaurants to get this that’s all.
As for the cruise lines, I would say the likelihood is that they would factor in that a lot of people would not get their monies worth out of these packages and would still get their profit regardless if they did anyway. They buy alcohol in bulk and at wholesale (and likely) duty-free prices in the cheapest of the many ports they would visit.
So there we have it, my opinion of the value of these, the maths for me is pretty conclusive in my own personal and maybe slightly lightweight perhaps case but everyone is different and they drink differently, so enjoy drinking responsibly.