CC 2014 Ratings - Lets Take a Deeper Dive

[ltlslick1]

Recently, Cruise Critic released its ratings for the best overall cruise ships of 2014. Those ratings were of course based off of user ratings..ratings from people like you and me. While I don't disagree with the ratings, after all they are pretty abstract, I was curious to see if there were any trends that played out in the numbers. I chose some easy to gather statistics about each ship and dumped the data into excel. You can see I primarily focused on ship age, ship size, and the amount of people on board. This does not take into account if a ship is a luxury brand versus a value brand, if it sails in Alaska versus the Caribbean, or if it sails 14 day itineraries versus 5 days itineraries - you get the picture. One can slice and dice data in a million different ways so this is by no means a conclusive review but hopefully it provides a little more context for the rankings - maybe it will and maybe it won't but regardless, here are the numbers.

 

Large Ships

 

Conclusions: Younger ships score better - no surprise here. The average age of the ships are skewed upward by the Carnival ships. Ship size (within the category of large ships) does not seem to have much bearing on the rank at first glance - the problem here is that the Allure heavily skews the average higher. When the Allure is excluded from the data, one can see that larger ships (with the exception of the Nieuw Amsterdam) generally score better. Next up the passenger to crew ratios - you would expect the lower number to score better here which is to say there is a higher # of crew members on board for each passenger. The numbers make sense because we know roughly that lines like Celebrity have more crew aboard while a line like Carnival has less. I still don't think based off of these numbers that one can make the argument that more crew per passenger resulted in a higher ranking. One final data point would be the Tonnage/(Pax+Crew) number. This was my attempt to approximate how much space each living soul on board has. This is a very rough number as tonnage is a weight, not a surface area but I will say the numbers seem to make sense. Celebrity and Carnival generally offer more space per passenger while if you look at a specific ship like Allure of the Seas, there is less space per passenger. I know this a very rough number as crew areas could be larger/smaller on some ships versus others in addition to a host of other factors. My conclusion though would be that having more personal space did not give ships a higher ranking.

 

Medium Ships

 

Conclusions: Ships being younger helped them in the rankings with Disney ships being the exception. Ship size within the medium category does not seem to have much of an impact on rankings. Ships with more people on board (passengers and crew) had the tendency to do better in the rankings. Amount of space on board also did not seem to have much of an impact. One interesting note about the medium category is that there is a much greater diversity of ship brands being represented versus the large category.

 

Small Ships

 

Conclusions: Younger ships earned the top 4 rankings. Smaller ships within the category excluding the Crystal Serenity earned the top 5 rankings. As ships within the small category are mostly luxury brands, its no surprise to see the much higher crew to passenger ratios - the amount of service received on these ships is very high. All the ships do pretty well with these ratios so none of them seemed to rank better because of it. Space per person also produced mixed results. The small ship category is very different from the medium and large ships so its tough to draw conclusions on what I would consider mass market metrics.

 

Final thoughts: Hopefully you found this interesting - I think in some cases you can draw some conclusions from the ship stats while in other cases things are a bit more blurry. At the very least, this is some fresh content for the boards, something that has been a little tougher to come by recently. I think it is also a good time to think about how we are being critical on these forums. There is a lot of information out there on ships (qualitative and quantitative) so in a lot of ways we know what we are getting into before we cruise. This is just my way of saying lets try to be constructive when we can versus stating what we didn't like about a cruise - to make generalizations like the food is always bad on (insert name here) cruise line does not help other cruises seeking information. I've only had good and better cruises in case anyone is wondering. Thanks for taking the time to read. Happy cruising everyone!

[CRUISEFAN0001]

WOW - that's some really in-depth analysis.

 

I would generally agree with your conclusions.

 

I'd add this...any survey tends to be subjective anyway based on personal preferences. So even just resurveying to a different group of participants could render different results than the original survey. All that said, the general trend to larger and newer ships seeing a higher preference rating does not come as a surprise.