Live · 298 cruises

Cruises

Every ship with at least 3 z-qualifying Cruise Critic reviewers, ranked on a 90% confidence-interval floor and dual-scored (z-normalized + raw average).

298

Cruise ships

171.7K

Cruise Critic reviewers

214.1K

Reviews ingested

21.2K

Z-qualified pool

Top of the rankings

Highest z-normalized percentile

Where the methodology pays off

Biggest inflation gaps

Ships where z-normalized and raw-average percentiles diverge most.

Azamara Onward

Azamara82.5+56

Azamara · z=82.5 raw=26.3

Carnival Radiance

Carnival14.5-50

Carnival · z=14.5 raw=64

Queen Elizabeth

Cunard79.8+46

Cunard · z=79.8 raw=34

Carnival Jubilee

Carnival35-40

Carnival · z=35 raw=75.4

Seven Seas Navigator

Regent Seven Seas60.6+39

Regent Seven Seas · z=60.6 raw=21.5

Aurora

P&O33.7-37

P&O · z=33.7 raw=71

Score distribution

z-normalized · all 298 cruises

Source coverage at launch

One source at launch — Cruise Critic — with uniform reviewer weighting. Cruise Critic is the deepest crowd-review pool in the category (Trip Advisor-owned since 2007) and has the widest ship coverage. Roadmap: TripAdvisor cruise reviews, Cruise Hive editorial, Berlitz Guide.

Cruise Critic is the live source. Editorial and additional crowd sources are roadmapped; weights below activate when those sources come online.
Cruise Critic (live)	171.7K reviewers, 214.1K reviews ingested. 21.2K qualified for z-normalization (DB1, stddev>0). Catalog filter: ≥3 z-normalizable reviewers per ship.
TripAdvisor cruises (planned)	Weight 4 — wider crowd pool, more gaming pressure
Cruise Hive (planned)	Weight 6 — editorial, news-driven coverage of new ships
Berlitz Cruising (planned)	Weight 9 — annual professional rating, in-person sailing

Cruise Critic is the live source. Editorial and additional crowd sources are roadmapped; weights below activate when those sources come online.

Global and cohort percentiles

Every ship gets two percentiles: global (CI-floor ranked against all ships in our database) and cohort (same CI-floor, re-ranked within its cruise line).

Global — headline number on the product card. A 90 means top 10% of all ships we've ranked.
Cohort — the same CI-floor ranked against same-line peers. A Carnival ship at cohort-95 is the best Carnival ship we've measured.
Score gap (z-normalized vs raw) — large gaps surface ships whose crowd score is inflated relative to what bias-corrected reviewers actually thought.

Frequently asked questions

Why normalize cruise reviews?+

Cruise Critic's long-run rating average is 4.07 / 5 — virtually every ship clusters between 3.8 and 4.6. The crowd grade-inflates and rates regression-to-the-mean. Z-normalization re-centers each reviewer on their own scale, so a 4.6 from a tough rater carries more signal than a 5.0 from someone who 5-stars everything.

How is the line cohort defined?+

When the source DB doesn't list a line, we infer it from the ship name (Disney → Disney Cruise Line, "Of the Seas" → Royal Caribbean, etc.) for ~93% coverage. The remaining ships fall under "Other" until editorial cleanup.

Why only 291 ships when there are 600+ cruise ships?+

The catalog filter requires ≥3 reviewers with varied rating habits (stddev > 0). Of 602 ships in the source DB, 452 have any reviews and 291 clear the qualifying-reviewer bar. Thinly-reviewed ships (river cruisers, niche luxury yachts) are added as their review counts grow.

What about review-bombing or paid placements?+

The CI-floor ranking penalizes thin samples automatically — a ship with 10 reviewers loses to a ship with 200 reviewers at the same mean z-score. Coordinated 5-star pushes get pulled toward the 4.07 global mean by the Bayesian prior until enough independent reviewers move the needle.

Status: cruises is live with 298 dual-scored ships across 29 cruise lines. Browse the catalog at /cruises/catalog, or view the full methodology for how each score is computed.