How the number is made

A reading, not a ranking. The scores behind it are set by an advisor who has sailed most of these ships and researched the rest, so they are judgement rather than measurement — held to a written rubric, audited against the operators' own published specifications, and identical for every visitor.

The calculation

match = 1 − ( Σ w·p ) ÷ ( 9 · Σ w )

The penalty p depends on the characteristic: two-sided (either direction is a mismatch), a floor (exceeding your target costs nothing), or a ceiling. Where a ship has no score, the characteristic leaves both sums — a gap lowers confidence rather than silently lowering the score.

Raw scores compress badly: everything decent lands close together, so a mediocre fit still reads as "quite good". The percentages shown are therefore rescaled against fixed anchors set from this fleet before display, and the band is the honest number.

What is not counted

Ruling ships out

Some things are facts rather than preferences to be traded off, so they exclude a ship rather than deducting from it. There are :

Excluded ships are always shown as excluded, with the reason, rather than quietly dropped. The age rule is the one exception to a hard exclusion: if applying it strictly would leave you fewer than five ships, the closer ones are kept and ranked below the rest, and the result says so. Evidence quality is recorded per ship and travels with the reading, but it does not exclude anything.

How long the questionnaire is

The data

A blank is a documented gap, never an imputed value. Where an operator does not publish a number, this tool says so rather than estimating it.

The characteristics

Each is scored 1–10 for every ship. The two ends of each scale:

How we’re paid

Expeditioner Travel earns commission from the cruise line on bookings we make, including on every ship in this tool. The scoring runs on published characteristics and is identical for every visitor — it does not know what any line pays, and no line pays for placement. Where a recommendation and our commission point in different directions, we will tell you.

What leaves your browser

Your answers are sent to our own server to be scored and are not stored there. The scoring model — the ship scores, the answer weights and the exclusion rules — never leaves that server. What comes back is the reading you see: one ship named in full — with its characteristic profile plotted against yours — four more as bands, and the reasons.