Ever since Royal Caribbean started using dynamic pricing for drink packages, excursions, and internet access, finding a great deal on these optional add-ons has been a challenge.
If you're like me, you want to get the lowest price possible on them. No one wants to pay more than you have to.
Most people are relegated to simply checking back periodically in hopes of finding a lower price.
While Royal Caribbean has done a better job at sending marketing emails and push notifications from its app to alert customers when sales begin, the reality is a new sale doesn't necessarily correlate to a lower price than what you paid.
A new online tool offers an easier way to track prices and save you money.
Price Tracker tool is free to use
Rather than logging in randomly to the Cruise Planner site to see what the price of a cruise add-on is right now, there's a tool for it.
RoyalPriceTracker.com is run by a cruise fan, and it offers a simple way to be notified if there's a lower price.
It's totally free to use this tool, as it's meant to be something for fans, by fans.
"We will help you save money on Excursion and Beverage Packages on your upcoming Royal Caribbean Cruise by tracking the prices and notifying you when the price drops!" is what the website advertises.
After creating a free account, you select your ship, sail date, and which item you want to track the price of.
Choices include:
- Drink packages
- Dining
- Spa
- Internet
- The Key
- Shore Excursions
- Photo Packages
- Arcade
- Onboard Activities
It's pretty much anything you can pre-book via Royal Caribbean's website or app.
You can select multiple items to add to your tracker.
That's it. Now you wait for something to happen. The site periodically programmatically checks the current price and compares it to the original price when you added it to the tracker. All prices are currently displayed in USD.
In fact, there's historical data too.
When I added the Deluxe Beverage Package for my upcoming Independence of the Seas cruise, I was able to see historical price data going back to December 2024.
It shows me that the average price has been $72.99 per person, per day, while the lowest price was $67.99 per person, per day.
The idea is simple, but it seems to work as it checks every day for new prices and that's usually often enough to get in on one of those lucrative 40% off drink package deals.
It tracks plenty more too
While I think the drink package is likely the most popular item people want to track, you can be alerted to plenty of other items too.
I was able to see upcoming shore excursions, and even browse them by day and port, rather than a laundry list of tours.
I like the ability to see Voom package and dining package price changes, as those are my most common buys.
How does it work?
RoyalPriceTracker doesn't disclose the "magic sauce", but it almost certainly uses some kind of a scraping method to find its information.
Since Royal Caribbean does not provide a commercial or public interface (known as an API) for developers to play with, it's probable that the site software has a means to access the Royal Caribbean site and programmatically check prices using a clever custom-built program.
Unrelated to RoyalPriceTracker, but another person built out their own open source price tracking software for Royal Caribbean prices.
In the case of this software, it relies on a Python programming language script to check publicly available information, "All the API calls are public and visible in the Firefox inspector. Everything in this code your browser is doing when you log into the Royal Caribbean website."
This tool would be run on your own computer, so the program would need to be run in perpetuity to constantly be able to track prices. But you have the code base and can run it on your schedule.
Consider it an option for advanced users only.
You still need to act to save money
Regardless of which tool you use, you have to do the final part and actually make the purchase.
None of the tools will cancel and repurchase anything for you. In fact, neither tool uses your Royal Caribbean reservation number or login credentials.
What they do is give you a heads up when there's a price drop, and then you have to go in and make the purchase.
Royal Caribbean allows you to cancel and rebook any pre-cruise purchase without penalty, making it one of my favorite hacks to save money on a cruise.
Of course, you can do this on your own and continue to check manually, but in the meantime, there's an easier way.
