Cruising Isn't All-Inclusive Anymore: The 2026 Cruise Fees

By Melissa Newman

Published June 2026

What "All-Inclusive" Actually Means in 2026

All-inclusive. That word actually used to mean something when you booked a cruise. You paid your fare, you walked up the gangway, and almost everything that mattered was already handled. Your cabin, your meals, the entertainment, the kids club during the day so you could eat one dinner in peace, a slice of pizza at midnight, and enough free drinks around the ship that you were not reaching for your card every ten minutes. That is not quite the cruise you are booking in 2026. The fare still looks about the same on the surface, but underneath it, the cruise lines have spent the last year quietly pulling things back out of the package and stapling a price tag onto each one. And the part that should really stop you in your tracks is that the one cruise line that actually kept its all-inclusive promise just gave up on it too. I will get to that one near the end, because it is the clearest sign yet of where every single one of these lines is heading.

I'm Melissa, a university professor who loves to cruise and who loves to talk ship.

I have made videos before about cruise stuff that is a flat-out waste of your money, the extras they upsell you that you barely touch. This is a different animal. This is not about the things you choose to buy. This is about the things that used to come with the cruise and now quietly do not. And if you spend any time in cruise groups online, you already know the temperature in there. The comment sections have turned into one long argument about whether cruising is even a good value anymore, and honestly, some of those people have a point.

1. The gratuities that never stop climbing

The first place you feel all of this is on your final bill, because early 2026 has turned into a wave of gratuity hikes. Carnival bumped its daily rate up to seventeen dollars a person for a standard room and nineteen for a suite. Princess went to eighteen dollars and up depending on your cabin, and quietly raised its onboard service charge to twenty percent on things like drinks and specialty dining.

Holland America fell right in line behind its sister brands, with its own increase landing for sailings leaving on or after the first of June. MSC raised its hotel service charge too, and up in the Yacht Club it now runs twenty-three dollars a person a day on new bookings. And those are just the lines that moved in the span of a few months.

Figures reflect line-published rates as of spring 2026 and vary by cabin and sailing. Confirm your exact rate at booking, as cruise lines change these often.

I want to be really clear about something, because this topic gets ugly fast online. I am not anti-gratuity. The crew on these ships work harder than just about anyone I can think of, often far from home for months at a time, and that money genuinely matters to them. I tip extra on top of the included gratuities, and I have for years.

In fact, here is a small confession. On my very first cruise I had no idea that was even a thing. I assumed the daily charge covered everything and that was that. Now I travel with a stack of singles and a little stash of two dollar bills that I have to order from my bank ahead of time, specifically so I can hand a little extra to the people who make my trip better.

My issue is not the tipping. My issue is the pace, and the quiet way they do it. These increases land by email, or they just appear on the website one day, with a line about how it all supports the crew. And maybe it does. But when four or five lines all raise rates inside the same few months, it stops feeling like a thoughtful adjustment and starts feeling like a coordinated nudge to see how much we will absorb. For a family of four on a week-long sailing, that is a few hundred dollars in gratuities before anyone has bought a soda.

2. The drink package math keeps getting worse

If gratuities are the charge you simply cannot avoid, the drink package is the one I wish more people would just say no to. And here is where I have a slightly different vantage point than most cruise channels, because I rarely drink. When I look at a beverage package that runs sixty, eighty, sometimes over a hundred dollars a person a day, the math has never once worked in my favor, and I suspect it does not work for a lot of you either. You have to drink a serious volume every single day just to break even, and most people massively overestimate how much they will actually order once they are lying by the pool half asleep.

But this one earned its spot because of where the numbers went in 2026. Norwegian raised the gratuity attached to its drink package on its shorter sailings, the two to five night cruises, up to thirty-two dollars a person a day. Read that back. That is the tip on the package, not the package itself, and it is landing on exactly the short, party-style cruises where people buy these things expecting a deal. Stack that on top of the twenty percent service charge that is already built into everything you order, and the value gets worse, not better.

My honest take is the same as it has always been. Do the real math on your own habits before you buy a single package, and if you are anything close to a moderate drinker, you are almost certainly better off paying as you go and pocketing the difference.

3. They actually put a price tag on the pizza

Then there is the charge that feels weirdly personal, because pizza on a cruise ship was practically sacred. It was the thing that said, no matter what else costs money up here, the ship will always feed you.

Now, to be fair, the pizza by the pool is still free, and I want to be accurate about that. But the sit-down pizzeria, the nicer version you actually want to sit and linger over, now comes with a fixed price of around fifteen dollars a head unless you bought one of the all-inclusive packages. Princess started this a couple of years ago and has only leaned in harder since, even adding an activation fee just to use the feature that delivers food and drinks to wherever you happen to be on the ship.

And look, it is not the fifteen dollars that bothers me. It is the principle of it. When a cruise line decides that even the casual, comforting, sit-down-with-a-slice food is now a revenue stream, you are watching the definition of the word cruise shift right in front of you. The fix here is simple but a little sad: know before you board which food on your specific ship is still included and which is not, because the answer is different than it was even two years ago.

4. Now they want a fee to bring it to your door

And the food charges do not stop at the restaurant. Room service, which used to be one of those small civilized perks of cruising, has quietly turned into another line item on more and more ships. Plenty of lines now tack on a service fee for room service, especially late at night, and the deliver-it-to-me-anywhere features almost always carry a charge just to switch them on.

And here is the one that really tells you which way the wind is blowing, because it feels less like a fee and more like a small betrayal. Word going around right now is that Disney, of all companies, is testing a room service charge on its brand new ship, the Disney Adventure. We are talking about a five dollar delivery fee plus an automatic eighteen percent gratuity on top, on your lunch, your dinner, your late-night snack, with only breakfast staying free. Now I want to be careful here, because as I am recording this, Disney's own website still lists room service as complimentary, and the company has not officially confirmed any charge. For the moment it is only being reported on that one ship sailing out of Singapore. But think about what it means that it is Disney even running the experiment. This is a company that went decades without ever charging a guest to have a plate of food brought to their room, and that free room service was a genuine point of pride for them. If Disney is quietly trying this out, even on a single ship, you can bet every other line is watching to see how we react.

This is exactly where my two dollar bills come back into the story, because I still tip the person who shows up at my door, every time, regardless of what the line is already charging me. But there is something a little deflating about getting nickel-and-dimed to have a sandwich brought up to your cabin on a vacation you already paid thousands of dollars for.

5. Wi-Fi that costs more than your phone plan

Let me give you one I am actually a little more forgiving about, just so you know I am not out here complaining about every single line on the bill. Connectivity at sea was never something anyone seriously expected for free, and the satellite technology behind it is genuinely expensive to run.

That said, the pricing has gotten a little ridiculous. Most lines now charge per day and per device, and the fast Starlink tiers can run you twenty-five, thirty, even forty dollars a day on some lines, which is more for a week of cruise Wi-Fi than a lot of you pay for an entire month of service back home. A few suite categories include it, and you will usually save by buying ahead instead of onboard. My honest opinion is that most of you do not need the premium streaming tier. Buy the basic plan if you need to stay reachable, and give yourself permission to actually be unplugged for a few days. That part is still free.

6. The kids club after dark

If you are cruising with little ones, this next one is the one that blindsides parents, and I think it is one of the quietest changes on this whole list. The kids club was always part of the magic of a cruise for families. You drop the little ones off with the counselors, they have a blast, and the grown-ups get a real dinner and maybe a quiet hour to themselves.

During the day, that is still included on most ships, and good for them for keeping it that way. But the after-hours care is where the meter has started running. On Royal Caribbean, the late-night care for the older kids, the slot after ten at night, jumped from ten dollars an hour per child up to fifteen. And the nursery for the babies and toddlers carries an hourly charge any time you use it, somewhere around nine dollars an hour during the day and a couple dollars more in the evening. Stack a few late evenings on top of each other across a week, and that quiet adult dinner is suddenly costing you a real chunk of change on top of everything else.

I get why they do it. Late-night childcare is labor, and somebody has to staff it. But for a family that booked a cruise specifically because it felt like the one vacation where the kids were handled, finding a fresh hourly rate waiting after ten o'clock stings in a way the brochure never warned you about.

7. Even Virgin Voyages finally gave up

And that brings me to the one I teased at the very beginning, the one that made me want to make this video in the first place.

If you have followed me for a while, you know Virgin Voyages has held a soft spot for me, and the reason is almost entirely about this exact topic. Their whole pitch was radical transparency. The price you saw was basically the price you paid. Every dining venue was included, even the steakhouse, with no upcharge games. There were no forced packages just to enjoy the basics. And the thing they were proudest of, the thing they built an entire brand identity around, was that gratuities were already handled, with nothing extra to add at the end. For a long time, Virgin was the living proof that a cruise could still genuinely be all-inclusive if a company simply decided it wanted to be.

That promise has changed. Under Virgin's newer fare structure, gratuities now show up as a separate daily charge, twenty-two dollars a person a day, or twenty if you prepay, where before there was simply nothing extra to tack on. To be fair to them, they still do not pile additional gratuities onto your drinks or your dinner the way the other lines do. But the one company that built its whole brand on not putting a separate gratuity on your bill now puts it right there on the bill.

And that is exactly why it belongs at the end of this list, because it is not really about Virgin at all. Sure, the luxury lines will still wrap everything into one price, but for the rest of us, the one holdout that actually mattered just blinked. The word all-inclusive is still printed in the brochures and still floating around in the ads, but on the mainstream ship you and I are most likely to book in 2026, it now comes with an asterisk on nearly everything, and that asterisk is only getting longer.

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Trying to decide whether to keep or remove your tips? Read my honest take on removing your auto-gratuities.

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission if you book through them, at no extra cost to you. Thank you for supporting Professor Melissa!