Is a cheap world cruise actually possible?

That’s the question we asked ourselves.

So we thoroughly investigated this seemingly unlikely potential, as we planned a trip entirely around the world without flights.

Over the past five years of our nonstop travels around the world, we make concerted efforts to pursue and uncover some of the best travel values in the world, while stretching our travel dollars as far as possible.

It’s an open secret how traveling through cheaper destinations like Southeast Asia can be easily accomplished on a modest budget of $25 per day, or even less. It’s actually quite easy to achieve a high standard of travel at a low cost in many parts of Latin America and Eastern Europe too. It’s a proven strategy that has allowed us to travel well without spending a fortune over the course of the past several years.

But we also like getting off the well-worn backpacker trails and going beyond the world’s more economical nomad hotspots. We like to show how even seemingly extravagant travel experiences can be affordable. For example, we’ve proven how to visit the Galapagos on a Budget, take an African Safari for $50/Day, or even have a Luxury Trip to Egypt on a Budget.

Yet this past year we gave ourselves the biggest budget travel goal we’d ever set out on: attempting a cheap around the world cruise.

The terms “world cruise” and “budget travel” are two contrasting phrases that don’t normally mix. We want to prove that they can!

To up the ante, we also decided to plan our cheap world cruise route through some of the most expensive countries to travel. Lingering in budget travel havens like Thailand and Mexico would be far too easy of a strategy to keep travel costs low.

Instead, our cheap around the world cruise route would wind through all three of the world’s top 3 most expensive countries to visit: Switzerland, United Kingdom, and France (source: BusinessInsider). The journey would further include prolonged stays throughout notorious budget-busting nations like Japan, Canada, and Italy. These are all places we’ve tended to avoid in the past, largely due to the presumed high costs involved. But the desire to explore such remarkable destinations was strong. Hence, there’s always a way!

We further raised the stakes by visiting many of the world’s most expensive cities, including Singapore (#1), Hong Kong (#4), Seoul (#6), Tokyo (#11), Rome, London, and Beijing. (source: Economist Worldwide Cost of Living 2018 survey)

We would attempt to carry out this seemingly expensive feat by staying in mostly nice hotels and renting out entire homes, that would even include our very own Italian villa on the Mediterranean. Throughout the voyage, we would partake in quintessential high-end culinary experiences from eating Kobe beef in Japan to indulging in fondue in the Swiss Alps, and even some Michelin-stared restaurants in between. We would go on to have such costly experiences like downhill skiing across South Korea’s Olympic mountains, visiting an international Disney theme park, and sipping on bubbly while touring France’s Champagne region.

We did it all.

But to top it all off, our primary form of transportation to get around to all these pricey places in the world: cruise ships!

We spent a total of 2½ months cruising entirely around the world on luxury liners, getting wined and dined each night before taking in an awesome show, retreating to our lavish stateroom, and then being transported to the next exotic port for another day full of adventure on land.

And we accomplished this all on a fairly low budget.

This post gives all the cost breakdowns and explains our strategies of how we pulled off what may seem completely impossible: a cheap round the world Cruise.

For those with champagne tastes on a beer budget, we want to show our crazy method of how a cheap world cruise can be accomplished. Whether you’re considering such an epic round the world adventure of your own as part of a gap year, career break, retirement trip, or just dreaming, we want to show you that it’s possible.

By employing some proven budget travel strategies, leveraging some lesser known travel hacks, understanding how repositioning Cruises work, traveling independently, and perhaps being willing to spend just a few bucks more on occasion, we found out that you can open the doors to a world of luxury and prolonged travel you may not have thought was possible.

Before setting off on this long-held travel goal of ours, we doubted ourselves if we could actually pull it off? Given all the luxury travel involved, combined with traveling through the world’s most expensive destinations, we were hesitant and doubtful. We wondered how much would this cheap world cruise actually cost?

So we set off on a grand journey around the world without flights to find out. We’re here now to share our discoveries, expenses, and strategies with you as we explore this illogical idea of a cheap cruise around the world.

How Cheap Is A World Cruise?

The idea of a world cruise seems like something achievable only to the wealthy and retired. We’re neither. Not even close.

Yet we love to travel and the idea of taking a cruise around the world is appealing. We regularly come across social media shares like this one that just popped up on my Facebook feed last week. It swoons over a 117-day Regent world cruise with an exotic itinerary that looks just as amazing as the elegant ship itself. Yet that world cruise has a pretty amazing price tag to match. If you can catch the “special fare,” currently the cheapest cabin for this world cruise is $124,998 for a couple. Ouch.

When looking at the expenses of long-term travel, it’s often easier to conceptualize daily or monthly costs. This cruise breaks down to $534 per person, per day. Or $32,000 for a couple, each month. Any way you slice it… yikes! And oddly enough, the Miami-to-Barcelona route of this “world” cruise doesn’t even make it entirely around the world. But I digress. The point is: this world cruise is a mega-expensive trip, only for the wealthy!

Surely there must be cheaper world cruises. And there is.

We recently scoured through all the current last-minute world cruise deals and the cheapest world cruise (2019) that we could find is this 112-night trip around the world on the Costa Luminosa for $29,012, if you’re okay to settle in with a small interior cabin. Gratuities add another $2,600 to your onboard account and we’d estimate that adventures ashore and the occasional cruise cocktail would further grow your travel expenses by at least an extra $5,000. Now add in the required visas plus some travel insurance and you’re realistically looking at a minimum spend of about $40,000 for a cabin for two. And that’s before the cost of flying to Venice, Italy, where this world cruise departs from on January 5, 2019.

As that breaks down to $179 per person, per day, for the nearly 4-month voyage, we think this is actually an excellent deal for a fully around the world cruise! Yet what amounts to $10,000 for a couple, for each month of travel is still entirely too much for our frugal travel tendencies.

For a cheap world cruise to be within our reach, we would need to be able to accomplish it on a budget of at least 1/3 of that cost.

That comes out to $60 per day. Such a spending plan would be an impossible budget for the extravagance of a world cruise.

…Or is it?

Our Method: How To Attempt A Cheap Cruise Around the World

Our secret weapon to accomplishing a cheap world cruise would be to carefully utilize a series of repositioning cruises.

During the past five years of traveling around the world, we’ve regularly used repositioning cruises as a cost-effective means of transportation to get from one continent to another. This is when cruise lines reposition their fleets in the spring and fall when the seasons change.

For example, beginning next month and into early November, many cruises will be repositioned from the Mediterranean to Florida and the Caribbean. Rather than floating an empty ship across the ocean, cruises are instead loaded with entertainment and stops are planned at exotic ports along the way to form an interesting cruise itinerary. These lengthy voyages with many sea days typically aren’t very popular, so prices often get slashed in attempts to fill the ships with paying passengers. When that happens, we take advantage of astonishingly low rates and set sail across the ocean in luxury. (Example: This 5* Norwegian Epic repositioning cruise, is sailing from Barcelona to Florida on Nov 4, 2018, and is currently priced at $529 per person, for the two-week cruise across the Atlantic and through the Caribbean.)

Rather than sitting in a cramped coach seat on an overnight flight, we instead get to enjoy two weeks of island hopping, fine dining, entertainment, and relaxing in our comfy stateroom. Such repositioning cruises have given us a way to afford luxury that is often otherwise unattainable to our travel budget ways. The crazy thing is that these repositioning cruises are often priced less than a flight between two continents.

So over the years, we’ve crossed the Atlantic on four separate occasions, among other routes such as this Panama Canal cruise down to South America. Our lowest-priced transatlantic crossing was this two-week cruise we took for only $159!

While transatlantic cruises are the most common (and often cheapest) route for repositioning cruises, we’ve been well aware that there are some less common transpacific routes and even itineraries between Asia and Europe that pass through the Suez Canal.

Armed with a keen awareness of these different repositioning cruise routes and the corresponding seasonalities, we had to attempt to stitch them together in a grand attempt to form a cheap world cruise.

Doing so would take a great degree of planning, a bit of gambling on the ever-changing rate fluctuations, and a little luck to ultimately form our own patchwork of a cheap world cruise.

Using this method, it would not be a consecutive world cruise residing on a single ship entirely around the world for a 100+ day voyage. Rather, to catch these rare one-way cruise deals, it would require some carefully plotted timing, while also traveling overland in between the oceanic cruise segments.

The overland travels would be a small and welcomed concession we’re willing to make in order to achieve the financial feat of a cheap luxury cruise entirely around the world. Plus, we figured it would be nice to break apart all this time at sea with some extended adventures on land.

So that’s exactly what we set off to do.

How Our Cheap World Cruise Plan Materialized

While backpacking across the Andes of South America in early 2017, we began conceptualizing this cheap world cruise idea and eyeing potential one-way repositioning cruises to take.

We had long wanted to spend some extended time traveling across Canada. So we booked a flight to Halifax, Nova Scotia at the beginning of July, where we began to scour the Internet to investigate this cheap world cruise idea further. Turns out, that flight to Halifax would be the very last time we would get on a plane for quite a long time.

When we weren’t actively traveling and exploring Canada, much of the time during our 10-week trip across the country was dedicated instead to exploring the possibility of this idea of a cheap world cruise. Countless hours of research, budgeting, route-planning, and price checks were conducted between our touristic pursuits throughout Canada.

It wasn’t until we were in Montreal in August, that we pulled the trigger to really set this cheap world cruise trip into motion. That’s when we booked a last-minute repositioning cruise from Vancouver, across the Pacific Ocean, all the way to Japan!

It was happening.

Our Cheap World Cruise Itinerary & Travel Stats:

This westward trip across Canada was actually the beginning stages of our journey entirely around the world without flights.

At the time, it was all just a rough sketch of varying ideas and possibilities. But this cheap world cruise would ultimately take us to:

• 22 countries,
• visiting 35 Unesco World Heritage Sites,
• sleeping in 74 beds, and
• through over 100 different cities in the world!

The trip from Halifax completely around the globe and back took exactly 300 days, all without using a single flight.

Instead, we moved around the world using:

71 trains,
52 buses,
11 ferries + 1 river cruise,
7 rental cars,
6 long-distance taxis, and
4 ocean cruise ships that carried us around the world for a total of 2½ months!

Yet much more remarkable than our forms of transportation or where we slept each night, was the vast amount of amazing travel experiences we were so fortunate to have during this grand adventure around the world.

Highlights during the 10-month trip around the world included:

Tidal Bore Rafting Across the Most Extreme Tides in the World
Hiking among Moose in the Canadian Wilderness
Lobstering in Prince Edward Island
Taking the Amtrak Empire Builder Across the US
Cruising through Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park
Exploring Japan’s Most Atmospheric Ancient Temples
Hiking Japan’s Ancient Komono Kodo Pilgrimage Route
Eating Everything in Japan
Skiing on Downhill Olympic Ski Runs in South Korea
Attending a local Ice Fishing Festival (and actually catching!)
Venturing to the DMZ at the North Korea Border 
Finding Ourselves All Alone at a Remote Section of the Great Wall of China
Taking a River Cruise Down the Yagtze
Hiking Across the Fabled Avatar Mountains
Floating on a Junk Boat Through Vietnam’s Ha Long Bay
Relaxing on a Tropical Thai Beach
Experiencing the Wonderful Culture Shock that Incredible India Delivers
Roaming around Desert in Oman
Cruising Through the Suez Canal
Hiking from Seaside Village to Village in Cinque Terre
Learning Just How Delicious Fresh Pasta in Italy Is
Trekking the Swiss Alps
Drinking Champagne within France’s Champagne Region
Cycling to a Remote Belgian Monastery to Seek the World’s Best Beer
Pub Crawling around London‘s River Thames on a Sunny Day
Taking the Inaugural Cruise on the Brand New Norwegian Bliss to Complete Our Journey

^Phew, and that’s just the highlight reel. It was truly a trip of a lifetime.

So How Much Did It Cost to Take This Cheap World Cruise?

Here, we’re going into the deep details to fully break down the cost of our entire trip around the world. This trip budget includes all four cruises that we took, in addition to detailing the expenses of our stints traveling overland across the world’s most expensive nations.

We feel a bit naked revealing our personal finances and spending habits. But we are doing this because we want to show exactly how it is possible to actually afford a trip of this caliber.

Here’s how we broke it all down. Our travel expenses during the ten-month journey can be grouped into four large categories of costs:

• Accommodation
• Eating & Drinking
• Entertainment
• Transportation
  • The cruises themselves

Before drilling down into our detailed financial data, it’s worthwhile to take a second to understand some accounting challenges we faced when tracking our travel expenses.

It was tricky to categorize because many of these groupings often overlap. For example, we regularly seek out accommodation that includes breakfast and are willing to pay a bit more for that. We even stayed at some business hotels in Japan that further included complimentary curry rice for dinner (yum!). In such instances, we only allocated the expense to “accommodation,” even though the price we paid for the hotel covered two breakfasts and two dinners.

Such aforementioned occurrences lower our eating & drinking costs, even though it’s actually baked into the accommodation and entertainment expenses. As a result, hotel expenses are a bit overinflated since cheaper places were available that didn’t include meals.

We often used taxis and public transport to sightsee, which could logically be attributed to transportation. Yet given that our intention of using such transport was to pursue activities, such local transportation was instead allocated as entertainment. There are many more blurred lines like these aforementioned examples, but you get the point.

Perhaps our biggest accounting challenge is with the cruises themselves. Their costs are all-inclusive of our transportation, dining, onboard entertainment, and accommodation. This is what makes cruises such great value! But it also makes it damn near impossible to categorize. As such, we’ve separated cruising expenses from our land-based travels in between.

This preface is simply to let you know that these allocations may not be a perfect science, but we made a solid effort to categorize expenses the best we could to give you a glimpse into our personal finances of this cheap world cruise route we’ve attempted to achieve. We have meticulously tracked and are now revealing our personal expenses in an effort to show just how it can all be done.

So let’s take a look!

Eating and Drinking Costs on this Cheap World Cruise

During our 2½ months on cruises, we indulged in the included fine dining each night while sailing across the world’s oceans. The incredible cuisine we have access to onboard is one of the aspects we enjoy most about using one-way cruises to transfer between continents.

While traveling around the world on a budget, often fine dining experiences are out of reach for our finances. So when we get on a cruise, the included four-course dinners are an absolute treat. During the 2½ months we spent cruising over the past year, we enjoyed so many great appetizers, from escargot to seared scallops. Favorite main courses over the voyages included filet mignon, lobster, chateaubriand, and beef wellington.

These cruises weren’t just a giant buffet of cheap sandwiches. It’s really quality menu items and fine dining!

We almost never order dessert when dining out around the world. But on a cruise, that all changes. When a different cheesecake is available on the menu each night, we’re going to try them all!

Each of the four cruise lines we used has their own specialties. Perhaps most interesting was the Italian liner, Costa, which featured a regional Italian menu each night. And after roaming around dairy-free Asia for nearly a half-year, I can’t even begin to express what an amazing novelty it was to reintroduce delicious Italian cheese into our diet. We helped ourselves to so much authentic Parmigiano-Reggiano throughout the month we spent on that ship!

We’d further wake up to have eggs benedict for breakfast, sit down to an indulgent 3-course lunch, and follow it up with some petit fours during high tea. All of this decadence is completely included in the cruise fares. We didn’t ever pay a dime more while dining aboard the cruises during our 2½ months we spent aboard them.

Some ships have specialty restaurants that carry an up-charge. Many people love them. We personally never find them to be worth it, given the excellent meals available for free in the main dining rooms.

What we do find worthwhile is spending our money to eat local when on land. During days in port, we always roam around to try the local cuisine. In Vietnam, we devoured banh mi and pho. In Thailand, we slurped up as much tom yum and pad thai as possible. We chowed on kottu in Sri Lanka, followed by curries in India. We couldn’t possibly stop into a Greece port without stuffing our faces with a traditional Greek salad.

These expenses were very minimal in the grand scheme of things. And we always find that sampling the local cuisine to be so worth it when in ports, even though we had access to free food that was included on our cruises. We’ll detail how much we spent on all these local meals in a sec. But first we need to add in the bar bill!

Tips: Drinking on the Cheap During This World Cruise

Alcoholic beverages were not included on any of the four cruises we took around the world. (Gasp!) Drinks on these ships were all very expensive. For example, a beer typically costs anywhere from $6-$8 and cocktails are around $10 and up. It’s budget busting prices for anyone who likes to kick back a few. (We do.)

As such, we didn’t ever order much from the bar. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t ever drink. We just used the following tips to drink for free and cheap!

Fortunately, most cruises allow you to bring aboard your own wine. We take full advantage of that. We always researched rules in advance and brought aboard our maximum allowance. Corkage fees are only imposed if opened in the dining room.

Meanwhile, booking cruises during promotions often gave us the perks of additional bottles of wine that were gifted to our room once onboard. Since we’re seasoned cruisers, our loyalty status got us invitations to free cocktail hours and often gifted us even more wine to our stateroom. We further won bottles of champagne by participating in shipboard games like trivia contests. At some points during one cruise, we had more alcohol in our stateroom than we knew what to do with!

Just as we would eat local on port days, we also made strong efforts to drink local while docked. We would always seek out local breweries or whatever the interesting libations were native to the country we were passing through. Knowing the drink prices we would encounter back aboard the ship, we would sometimes overindulge a bit at the end of our port days. And often we found that security was fairly lax about bringing a few cans of beer back onto the ship, even though it was technically not allowed.

To further enjoy some beverages while on the ship, we tried to take advantage of any drink promos being offered. For example, during the transpacific cruise from Vancouver to Japan, there was a buy-one-get-one promotion on Alaskan craft beers. As thrifty beer lovers, I quickly had the bartender send a case to our stateroom, which brought our per-beer cost down to $2.98.

We also gave our livers some much-needed breaks during these long voyages since booze was often a costly commodity.

Just how costly? Consider if a couple each had an average of two glasses of wine each night, during the 2½ month time frame we spent cruising. That seemingly minor indulgence would ultimately add about $2,500 to your cruises!

Check my math: $9 per glass x 2 glasses x 2 people x 70 days = $2,520

Ouch! Those two glasses of wine per night are easily enough to buy two cruises! It’s kinda crazy, but it’s so easy to run up an extremely high bar tab on a cruise if you’re not careful.

That’s where they get ya! Yet we were always very careful to maintain a low (or no) bar tab using the aforementioned cheap drinking techniques and occasionally laying off the sauce completely.

That explanation just scratches the surface on our cheap cruise drinking strategies. For even more detail, here is some follow-up reading:

• How to Drink for Cheap on a Cruise
• 8 Ways to Score Free Drinks on a Cruise

Total Food & Beverage Cost While Cruising

Between eating & drinking in ports and some very minimal bar bills on the ships, we spent just shy of $500 on food & beverages during our cruising segments between the two of us. To be more precise, our eating & drinking expense totaled: $238 per person during the 2½ months aboard the cruises. That’s about $3.45 per cruise day, per person.

Eating & Drinking Costs When Traveling Overland

So we ultimately spent very minimally on food and drink while cruising, given the included dining and our thrifty tricks to drink cheaply onboard.

But what about those 200+ days we spent on land? We went from gorging ourselves with endless fresh sushi in Japan to sipping French champagne, all in a matter of months. That can’t be cheap!

Well, it wasn’t entirely cheap. Overall, we spent an average of $21.89, per person, per day on eating and drinking around the world, during the 230 days we traveled overland in between cruises. This cost may be slightly overinflated, as it also includes all groceries such as medicine, toiletries, and other knick-knacks we picked up along the way.

This is an area of our budget that could easily be much less for frugal travelers. But we really enjoy eating and drinking!

Given the quality of food we sought out and our penchant for tipping back a few pints, we’re content with our budget here.

How We Saved on Eating & Drinking Well Around the World

In Canada, we cut costs by cooking in some nights, given we stayed in apartments during the vast majority of our time there. Yet we also found great dining deals. You can see some of the cheap eats we found in our Guide to Halifax on a Budget. Meanwhile, in Montreal, we frequented a great restaurant where everything on their menu was CAD$6 ($4.50). Our downfall in Canada (and many countries) were the delicious beers we often splurged on.

In Japan, we lived off of economical sushi and delicious bowls of ramen. We found plenty of restaurants where meals easily came to less than $10 per person, while further cutting costs by some fantastic take-out options, like sushi, prevalent throughout the country. Of course we had to indulge in some splurge meals like shabu-shabu and Kobe beef. Yet we even managed to find the latter for under $10! Again, the high cost of beer in Japan helped to put our total here over $20, rather than under.

In South Korea, we found food to be slightly less than in Japan and alcohol significantly less. We cooked a bit in our two studio apartments to save too, but overall we found many economical local options to dine out in.

Yet it was China that offered us the biggest reprieve. We found local restaurants to be particularly affordable outside of the tourist areas and cheap booze too! Meanwhile many hotels in China covered the cost of our breakfast. And we were often traveling quickly, where we just grabbed a cheap noodle bowl or even fast food from the train station before boarding. China is not known for having inexpensive food. Yet for us, it was, particularly so relative to the other expensive countries we spent the year traveling through.

In Italy, pizza was almost a daily occurrence in our diet, which was as economical as it was delicious! We enjoyed incredible pasta dishes and regional specialties at many of the casual eateries. We usually replaced our preference for beer since cheap wine by the liter was less than a few pints ale. Yet it was the many well-placed gelato shops that helped to edge our daily food expense to a higher mark.

Our remaining time in Europe hurt our eating & drinking budget, from France to Switzerland, Belgium, and England, as we splurged quite a bit. We had to dine in Lyon’s famous bouchons and we weren’t going to pass through the Swiss Alps without a proper fondue dinner. We continued our splurges throughout France’s champagne region before later indulging in many Belgian and English ales. It all added significantly to our daily eating & drinking costs, but we didn’t linger in these countries, so the splurges didn’t impact our overall budget too much.

 

Cheap World Cruise Accommodation Costs & Strategies

We spent 2½ months sleeping in luxury on the cruises themselves. It was heavenly waking up to the lapping of  rolling swells and the sweet ocean breeze, as we often scheduled a morning pot of coffee to be delivered to our stateroom upon waking up.

Tip: Cruises with Overnight Ports Contain Excellent Value

A nice perk of some of the cruises we took was that they included overnight stops. Staying in port overnight is an emrging trend in the cruise industry. But it’s still a rare novelty, as most cruises stick to daytime port calls and move during the nights. When ships do stay in port overnight, not only does it give you a chance to explore more and experience the nightlife, but the ship essentially acts as a floating hotel in a prime location.

Our overnight port calls were fantastic cost savings, as stops included both Singapore and Hong Kong. These are two of the most expensive cities in the world! Decent low-end budget accommodation starts at about $70-$80 per night, while hotels easily cost well into the hundreds of dollars. Yet our accommodation cost while in Singapore and Hong Kong was fully covered on the Celebrity Millennium, as it docked in ideal waterfront locations right within these two cities. Our nightly cost in these most expensive world cities was $59.50 per person for five-star accommodation, which included breakfast, lunch, and dinner!

Maintaining High Standards and Low Rates While Traveling Overland

The majority (75%) of our nights during this round-the-world trip were spent sleeping on land, in between those luxurious nights on the cruises (25%). We were challenged with finding inexpensive accommodation in expensive destinations like Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing and throughout high-priced countries such as Canada, Italy, and France.

Over 220 days, paying for accommodation on land, we spent an average of $39.26 per night ($19.63 per person)while traveling through the most expensive countries in the world. Costs shown here are the total costs paid, including any taxes and cleaning fees. We did cash in points on a few occasions. But whenever doing so, we still accounted for the full price of what it would have cost, so that we could better provide a realistic look at actual costs on the ground, for those without points.

At a nightly rate of less than $20 per person, we were quite happy with that rate, particularly considering the expensive destinations we were traveling across, for such prolonged periods of time, and frequently in nice 3 & 4- hotels.

We pursued different strategies by country and even region to accomplish a high standard at a low cost, as accommodation prices varied greatly from one area to the next. Generally, we search among the least expensive places that have decent reviews, good wifi, and convenient locations. We’re big on breakfast, so that’s something we always look for and even opt to pay slightly higher rates when it can be included.

In some locations, our low-price search strategy lands us in a nice 4-star hotel. Other times, it may only get us a private room at a hostel. We zig and zag.

Here’s a look into what we paid each night, by accommodation type.

It may seem counterintuitive that rates for budget accommodation like motels ($48) or a private Airbnb room ($54) were actually more expensive than 3 & 4-star hotels (42$). This is because we booked nicer hotels only when in destinations where there were great deals. In locations where we booked budget properties, it was