Strange pricing for Escape

[supermax]

I'm looking at the 4/8/17 departure, Guarantee Balcony (BX). NCL.com price for 2 persons is $849pp, but for 4 persons it is $924pp. How can it be possible? It will be cheaper to book two rooms than one, which makes no sense. I checked other sites, and the pricing is similar.

[Carolina Girl 99]

Very strange indeed! I looked at the pricing details by guest (for 4 in a cabin) and while pax 1 & 2 fare is $849, it's showing pax 3 & 4 fare as $999 each. Don't know if it's some sort of glitch or not. Even without a 3/4 guest free rate, additional guests are usually around $499 on average for most sailings not in a Haven/suite cabin

 

Just looked at the week after, departing 4/15/17 and pax 3/4 are only $599 each

[Demonyte]

Completely normal. As the ship fills up, the fixed price of "3rd and up" is jacked up so that people would book separate cabins instead of filling out the lifeboat quotas with "extra" passengers forcing the cruise line to leave some cabins completely empty.

 

This happens often with popular cruises that have a lot of families.

[easyboy]

Just book at once what you believe is unusually low. Might change if you delay your decision.

[sanger727]

It's because there are too many people booking 3rd and 4th passengers. They don't want the lifeboat capacity to fill up with cabins still available. Either wait and hope they go back down or book 2 cabins.

 

 

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[kathy884]

I remember seeing the same thing on a Carnival cruise one time in the summer (cruise from New York up to Canada when school was out). Seems to happen quite a bit during school breaks when lots of cabins are booked already with three or four people. In our case, we ended up booking two cabins next to each other vs. the one cabin with extra people, and the extra space was nice.

[supermax]

Thanks for your answers. It seems like they are trying to maximize the revenue during the school break. We took a similar cruise last year, and didn't see this type of pricing.

[Demonyte]

Thanks for your answers. It seems like they are trying to maximize the revenue during the school break. We took a similar cruise last year, and didn't see this type of pricing.

 

 

If they were maximizing revenue, they'd have raised the "base prices" (first two passengers as the default is double occupancy). This pricing is purely because it balances the workload for the staff and the distribution of passengers to different muster stations.

 

If you really want (or if you only have one passenger over 21 in your group, need) to cram more than two passengers into one cabin, you can do so but you could get more space for cheaper by booking two cabins.

[Squidward Q Tentacles]

It can a really good thing. If two adults are traveling with two kids book two rooms with one adult and one child. Then in one cabin the adult can get the drink package and the soda package for one kid. That way both adults won't need to buy the UBP if they both don't drink alcohol. Of course you would need two soda packages if both kids wanted to drink soda.

[supermax]

I was planning for a balcony and inside, but ended up booking two balcony rooms. The price difference between inside and balcony was only $45pp. It worked out great- both rooms are just one room over from each other. Still, I'd rather have one room with the 3rd and 4th person discounts.