IS THE P&O DRINKS PACKAGE WORTH IT?
One of the biggest pre-cruise decisions with P&O Cruises — and one that seems to provoke endless debate — is whether or not to buy a drinks package.
On the surface, the packages look straightforward. In practice, the maths, the rules, and your actual drinking habits make it a little more nuanced.
We chose to pay as we went on our recent two-week cruise aboard Arvia. Here’s how the numbers stacked up — and whether, in hindsight, a drinks package would have made sense.
What P&O Actually Offers
P&O currently offers four drinks packages, which can be booked online before you sail or onboard within the first two days of the cruise.
At the entry level is the Refresh package, covering soft drinks only. Above that is the Alcohol-Free package, which adds tea and coffee from the onboard coffee shops. The Classic package includes alcoholic drinks up to a set value, while the Deluxe package extends this to premium spirits, cocktails, wine and larger pours.
Prices range from £16 per person per day at the lowest end, up to £65 at the top. Booking early can reduce the cost by up to 20 per cent, dropping to around 10 per cent closer to sailing. Once onboard, there are no discounts at all — and prices increase slightly. The Classic package, for example, rises to £55 per person per day.
The crucial detail, and the one that really matters, is that drinks packages must be purchased for the full length of the cruise and for every adult sharing a cabin. For a fairly typical 14-night cruise, with two adults sharing, the Classic package bought onboard would cost £1,540 in total. That’s the figure you need to beat before you’re even breaking even.
Bar Prices Onboard
Understanding onboard pricing helps put that number into perspective. House wine costs £8.50 per glass or £24 per bottle, with mid-range options creeping towards £10 a glass. Premium wines are available, particularly in venues like the Glass House, but they push the price up further.
Beers, ciders and basic spirits tend to sit between £5.50 and £8.50, while cocktails start around £8.50 in the outdoor bars and climb to £10-12 for speciality versions in places like the Crow’s Nest or Club House.
Water, thankfully, is free and readily available. Refill stations are dotted around the ship, and water is always served with meals. Tea and basic coffee are also available throughout the day, with water accessible 24/7.
What would a £55 drinks day look like?
To reach £55 in a single day on the Classic drinks package, you’re looking at something like this on a relaxed sea day.
A large (250ml) glass of mid-range wine with lunch at around £9.50 gets things started, followed by a beer or cider by the pool in the afternoon for roughly £7.
Later on, perhaps a rum on the rocks adds another £8, taking the running total to about £24.50. A pre-dinner cocktail — say a Negroni — at around £9.50 brings you to £34, after which two glasses of house wine with dinner add £17, lifting the total to £51.
Finally, a post-dinner nightcap for around £7 takes the day to approximately £58.
That’s seven alcoholic drinks spread fairly evenly across the day, including alcohol at lunch, multiple afternoon drinks, wine with dinner and a final evening drink.
It’s not outrageous, but it does require consistent, intentional drinking from the late afternoon onwards — and crucially, it’s a level you’d need to maintain every single day of the cruise, including embarkation and disembarkation days and port days when you’re off the ship until late afternoon.
What We Actually Spent
We chose to pay as we went. Over the course of two weeks, our total drinks bill came to £550 for the two of us.
That covered a pre-dinner drink most evenings, a bottle of wine with dinner (most but not every evening), and usually a drink or two afterwards. We drank a mix of beer, cider and rum on the rocks, mostly house wine, with the occasional upgrade to fizz, better bottles, and one or two cocktails.
We never felt as though we were holding back or censoring ourselves — we simply drank what we wanted, when we wanted it, within reason.
We also brought two bottles of wine onboard (one per person is permitted), which gave us a couple of evenings where we didn’t spend much at all on drinks. While you can’t take your own wine into the restaurants, enjoying it before and after dinner still makes a noticeable dent in the overall spend.
The Days That Change the Maths
This is where drinks packages often look better in theory than in practice.
On embarkation day, we boarded late and were tired and slightly jet-lagged. We didn’t drink at all. Disembarkation day was much the same — early starts and onward travel made drinking feel unnecessary. Yet both days would still have been fully charged under a drinks package.
Most port days followed a similar pattern. We were usually ashore until around 17:00, and on a couple of occasions even later. By the time we returned, showered and dressed for dinner, there’s only so much drinking you can reasonably fit in before bedtime — particularly when you’re getting up early to catch sunrises and make the most of the next day.
And of course, when ashore, it’s nice to try local drinks. If we had been tied into the drinks package, we might have felt that we needed to head back to the boat earlier than we would have liked to.
We had four sea days, which are really the only times when a drinks package starts to look tempting. Lunch might include a glass of wine, afternoons invite deck drinks, and the pace of the day is slower. Even factoring this in, though, we’d still have fallen well short of the £1,500-plus needed to justify the Classic package.
A Word on Soft Drinks and Coffee
The Refresh package may make sense for some, but it’s worth remembering that you can bring soft drinks onboard for consumption in your cabin, and they’re often cheaper to buy ashore in port than on the ship. While you can’t take your own drinks into bars or restaurants, there’s nothing to stop you enjoying them on deck.
Coffee lovers may find the Alcohol-Free package more tempting, as the standard onboard coffee is fairly basic. If you’re used to good espresso or cappuccino, you might want to purchase coffee from the onboard coffee shops. But, you’d need to ask whether the cost of one or two per day (£3-4 per coffee) justifies the drinks package.
Note – some higher-grade cabins include coffee machines, but ours didn’t — just instant.
So, Is the Classic Package Worth It?
For us, the answer was no.
To make the Classic package pay, we would have needed to more than double our actual drinks spend, every single day, including days when we didn’t drink at all. That would have required drinking for the sake of value rather than enjoyment — never a great place to be.
The package will absolutely work for some people. If you spend most of your time onboard, drink consistently throughout the day, enjoy cocktails and premium spirits, and value the simplicity of not thinking about prices, it may well be worth it.
But if your cruise is port-heavy, your drinking is concentrated around the evenings, and you’re happy with straightforward drinks, paying as you go can be dramatically cheaper — without feeling like a compromise.
We drank well, enjoyed ourselves, and saved close to £1,000 in the process. For us, that felt like the right call.
Written by Emma
Wine Lover. Yogi. Hiker. Writer.
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