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If you add up all charges for alcohol you will find that we spent a total of $642.83 which includes a $15 corkage fee for one of the bottles of wine that we brought on board and had in the Bordeaux Restaurant and another $15 corkage fee for one of the bottles of wine that we brought on board and had in Sabatini's Restaurant. We also brought 3 additional bottles of wine onboard that we drank in our cabins for which there was no corkage fee since Princess allows each person to bring one bottle of wine onto the ship without a corkage fee.
If you divide the total of $642.83 that we spent on alcohol by 3, that comes to $214.28 per person. This was well under the cost of any drinks package offered for 3 people for 6 days and we never went wanting for more drinks. The best price I can find for an alcohol package on the Princess website is $70.79 USD per person per day ($59.99 per day plus a 18% gratuity). That would have come to $424.74 for each of us for the 6 day cruise or a total of $1,274.22 for all 3 of us for the 6 days. Not purchasing an alcohol package saved us $631.39 for this 6 day cruise.
We did give $1 in cash as a tip for each drink that we purchased, but we would have done this even if we had a drinks package so that would have cost the same either way. Now you might say we had to pay for the 5 bottles of wine that we brought on board in addition to the $15 corkage fee that we paid on 2 of the bottles of wine. True, but if we purchased those bottles of wine on the ship they would have been way more expensive than the retail price we paid and having a drinks package only gives 15% off the price of bottles purchased. Also, we went to two wine tastings during the cruise. The drinks package only gives 15% off each of those. Thus, the drinks package would not have saved us much on the wine tasting events or the bottles of wine that we brought on board.
If instead of bringing any bottles of wine onboard we just ordered wines by the glass that were included in the drinks package, we would have saved the cost of buying the 5 bottles of wine. That would have saved us $250 at most, but then we would have been limited to the wines included in the drinks package which were not of the same quality as what we brought on board. We also spent $37.76 to have 36 small bottles of water and 12 cans of soda delivered to our room at the start of the cruise for the 3 of us. At the end of the cruise we left more than half of the cans of soda and bottles of water in our room so we really over purchased what we needed. If you put it all together I think we still saved well over $500 on this 6 day cruise for the 3 of us by not purchasing an drinks package.
Naturally whether or not it is worth purchasing a drinks package is going to vary person by person. It really all depends on what types of drinks you like and how many drinks you will purchase. I really just wanted to point out that it is not just teetotalers that will save by not purchasing a drinks package. If you are like us where each person drinks a half bottle of wine or more per day plus one to two additional cocktails per day and like to attend many of the tasting events, you can still save a lot by not purchasing a drinks package.
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If in this report you see any typos, misspellings, factual errors or other types of errors, please let me know.
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