Shipfaced: Alcohol on Cruise Consumption

From the Shipmate Archives. Originally published January 9, 2016. 

Cruisers Love Their Alcohol

Having alcohol on your cruise ship is like having a captain… important. This is according to our recent study into alcohol consumption on a typical cruise ship.

It seems that once our ship mates ship off, they get ship-faced.

The infographic below shows the average consumption of alcohol during a cruise vacation. On the typical 7-day sailing, 62,000 drinks are consumed! Per passenger, that’s an average of 33 drinks per week or 4.7 alcoholic drinks per day.

The typical American consumes four drinks per week in his or her normal daily life.  That means that, on average, people drink 8x as much while on a cruise ship as they would normally.

For those that hate reading infographics, here’s a list of the average daily consumed alcoholic beverages while on a 7-day cruise.

Per Cruise Passenger / Per Day

• 0.3 glasses of champagne
• 0.7 beers (I am so abnormal)
• 1.2 glasses of wine
• 2.4 mixed drinks

That’s roughly $34 per day (without tip) spent every day, so around $240 spent during the course of seven days per passenger. And you wonder why you got such a good deal on the cruise!

Note: The average consumption numbers shown above don’t take into account the amount of booze smuggled onboard! As you can see from that post, it definitely happens.

It’s also fun to look at the cruise ship as a whole.  Over the course of a 7-day sailing, the following total amounts of alcohol will be drunk, sipped, shot, chugged, lapped up, etc.

Per Cruise Ship / Per Week

• 1,200 glasses of champagne
• 10,100 beers
• 17,000 glasses of wine
• 32,700 mixed drinks

Serious Beer Money

If we look at the total dollar amount of booze sales for ALL passengers for the ENTIRE week, we’re talking close to $500k.  Annualized, this means that over $20 million dollars per year are spent on alcohol per ship!  The Carnival Cruise brand has 24 ships… are you ready for this?  Put your drink down first.  That accounts for HALF A BILLION DOLLARS in alcohol sales just for Carnival Cruise Line ships!

When considering how many cruise lines Carnival Corporation owns, it’s fair to assume that they see more revenues from alcohol than BevMo (estimated $1B).

Now, drink up this infographic.

Do you get shipfaced?

Let us know your thoughts below.  Are you disgusted with the amount of alcohol consumed on cruise ships?  Or, did you think to yourself, “Pssh, I take that much booze down before the muster drill?" Many of you ship mates will be on opposite ends of the spectrum.  We have our assumptions, but we won’t tell you what they are. Please share with us your booze habits while at sea. Leave your comments below.