Carnival Drink Package Calculator
Is the Carnival drink package worth it? Choose your exact ship, date, and drinks and we’ll give you a definitive answer.
Which cruise are we pricing?
We pull nights, itinerary, sea days and the line’s package rules straight from the gangwaze sailing database.
Actual Carnival drink package cost
Carnival adds 20% gratuity to the CHEERS! Beverage Program at purchase and it is not optional. That gap, $13.99 a day, is the single most common surprise on the folio. Everything below already includes it.
How much are mixed drinks on a Carnival cruise? $12.75
That is the median of 20 individually priced cocktails, from real onboard menu photographs. Every category below is the same: counted, not estimated.
Alcohol categories first, then everything else. Prices are as printed on the menu, before the 18% bar gratuity. The $20 cap is the CHEERS! Beverage Program's per-drink ceiling: above it Carnival covers $20 of the drink and you pay the difference.
All 129 Carnival drinks, priced individually
Searchable, filterable by category, and flagged against the package cap. It lives on its own page so this one can stay about the decision.
The CHEERS! package covers 100% of the bar
84 of the 84 priced alcoholic drinks on Carnival sit at or under the $20 cap, so the package pays for those in full.
priced alcoholic drinks
Nothing on this menu exceeds the cap
Every priced alcoholic drink sits at or under $20, so the package pays for all of them in full.
Does the Carnival drink package ever go on sale?
4 observations from Jul 2026 to Oct 2026, ranging $48.93 to $69.95.
Drink Package price drop alerts
Finish the calculator at the top of this page and the result comes with a price alert. Pick your ship and sail date, confirm your email with a six-digit code, and we will write to you when the CHEERS! package is reported at least 5% below the price you were quoted.
- ·Drops only. A rise never triggers an email.
- ·Tied to your sailing, and it stops on your sail date.
- ·Triggered by reports that agree, not by one anecdote.
4 points today, more as people report.
Prices people actually paid are collected in the calculator at the top of this page, not here. Reports are held until three independent observations agree for a ship and month, so nothing arrives on this chart as a single anecdote.
Report what you paid in the calculatorEvery drink package rule, in plain language
5 apply on every Carnival sailing. 3 depend on your cabin, your homeport or what you order, and those are the ones that change the answer.
Gratuity
Carnival charges $69.95 per person, per day if you buy CHEERS! before you sail, and adds a 20% service charge: $83.94 a day for every adult in the stateroom. Individual bar drinks carry an 18% gratuity instead. Both are built into the figures above.
Cabin purchase rule
Every guest 21 and over assigned to the same stateroom must buy CHEERS!. That is why the cabin total counts all of them.
Max drink value
CHEERS! fully covers spirits, cocktails, beer and wine by the glass priced $20 or less: most of the menu. Above $20 you get 25% off the menu price rather than full coverage.
Daily limit
Up to 15 alcoholic drinks per 24-hour period (6am–6am). After 15, the bar stops serving you on the package. One drink at a time, no sharing.
Pre-purchase
Buy CHEERS! before you sail and save $5 per person per day versus the onboard price. Cut-off is 11:59pm the day before embarkation.
State tax
On US sailings, state and local tax is added to each drink’s menu price on your Sail & Sign folio (based on the drink price, not the daily package rate) whenever you use CHEERS! in US waters.
Embarkation day
Sailing from Texas, Norfolk or New York? CHEERS! doesn’t activate until 6am on Day 2, so day-one drinks are paid à la carte.
Not included
Excludes souvenir-glass drinks, bottles of liquor, gangway and room-service/minibar drinks, and shared cocktails, pitchers, tubes and buckets. CHEERS! also stops at the ship: it does not cover anything you buy ashore, including at Carnival's own Celebration Key, unlike Royal Caribbean, whose package does work at its private islands.
Does the Carnival drink package work at Celebration Key?
The package is valid on board the ship only. It does not cover bars at Celebration Key, or at any port of call. Guests routinely assume the opposite because the island is the line's own, and the first drink ashore is where they find out.
This section only appears for lines where we hold a private-island rule. Where we do not, it is absent rather than empty.
Find yourself on this list
The CHEERS! package pays for itself at 6.4 alcoholic drinks a day, with the $20 cap already counted. Ignore the cap and it flatters itself to 6.4.
Break-even is the package price with gratuity divided by the average value it actually delivers per drink, so the $20 cap is inside the number rather than assumed away.
How the calculator works
Two totals, honestly compared. What the package really costs once the line has taken its cut, against what your drinks would ring up one at a time.
Frequently asked questions
Sailing a different line?
The hub compares every line we track, then routes you to that line's own calculator.
Back to the hub
