Magic

Our New Sorting Algorithm to Help You Find The Best Cruises

Last Updated on June 27th, 2019

You may have encountered our new way of sorting cruises, which we call "Magic". This is a change from our previous default sort "Lowest Cost Per Day", which is still available, so I wanted to explain how it's different and why we switched.

I originally built CruiseSheet only for myself. Before it was a cruise agency, it was just a list of all of the best cruise deals. I found that most companies would hide the true cost of the cruise by not including taxes or fees, and that they didn't make it easy to search by the best prices per day.

While the primary purpose of CruiseSheet is now to help people find the best cruise deals on the internet, I still use it almost every day to find cruises for myself, my friends, and my family.

I recently analyzed the cruises that people actually end up booking through CruiseSheet and realized that despite constantly promoting them, very few people were booking the cruises that were the cheapest per day. Most people would book great deals on more high-end ships, but they had to dig through search results to find them. When I booked my cruises for the year, I noticed that I had to do the same.

Magic is our attempt to highlight the types of cruises we all actually book and are looking for. We are still tweaking the formula, but we take into account over a dozen different factors to score each cruise and rank it. Rather than look at each cruise as one unit, we individually rank each cabin type. So, for example, if it only costs $10 more to upgrade from an inside cabin to a balcony cabin, we will show that balcony cabin in the results. Other factors we consider are the route, the age of the ship, the amenities onboard, line popularity, and many more.

The most highly weighted factor is still the price per day after tax. We are excited to feature higher-end cruises that reflect what our customers are after, but only when they represent an excellent value.

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