Room. Food. Entertainment. These three items differ greatly among the cruise lines, and if you’re particular about any one of these, you’ll want to pick the cruise line that best fits your needs and wishes for your reposition cruise. See the chart below of how we rank cruises and take the Which Cruise Line Is Best for Me? at the bottom of this post.
What is a Reposition Cruise?
Reposition cruises are different from regular cruises. These one-way cruises tend to be longer than 16 days. Picking the right cruise line for your personality is important. Due to the length of them, if something doesn’t work for you, it’s not going to work for you for a long time. The same goes for if you love something, too!
In the past four years, we’ve taken over 20 repositioning cruises, and we’ve seen across the cruise lines how Rooms, Food, and Entertainment stack up comparatively. Granted, there might be differences between the ships within a cruise line, but across the cruise lines, these differences stick out. These differences aren’t necessarily in comparison to each other, they’re just differences. Let’s take a look at how these categories stack up across the following cruise lines: Princess, Carnival, MSC, Cunard, Norwegian, and Holland America.
You’ll see in the chart below how we rate the categories across the cruise lines.
Which Cruise Line Has the Best Beds?
In this category, we place the comfort of the bed, the size of the room, the comfort of the bathroom, and the accessibility of electrical plugs. We mostly stay in inside cabins and have based our rankings in the chart below on just inside cabins.
Which Cruise Line Has the Best Food?
None of the cruise lines have good vegan menus. They all have vegan menus, but the food consistently comes up bland and mushy. Therefore, I often eat off the regular menu in the dining room and indulge in the salads and Indian food on the buffet lines. In the dining room, I frequently order the one vegetarian dish on the main menu or ask for a modification to get the dish as “vegan” as I can. When a salad bar has lentils, garbanzos, and/or nuts, it gets high marks from me.
Which Cruise Line Has the Best Entertainment?
Creating entertainment on repositioning cruises must be difficult for the entertainment team, and hiring artists who are willing to cruise long distances must also be a challenge. On repo cruises, the audience is often multicultural and multilingual, so comedy often fails. A joke in English about Americans doesn’t translate well to Japanese! So the entertainment is often limited to dance performances, magicians, lectures, or singing.
Which Is the Best Cruise Line Overall?
In this catchall column, we compare the cruise lines to each other based on the overall experience that not only includes Room/Food/Entertainment, but also the staff, the vibe, the condition of the ship, the customer service, and anything else that might go into an overall experience category.
| Cruise Line | Room | Food | Entertainment | Overall Experience |
| Princess | Good beds, bad plugs | Good quality, low quantity, some nuts | Best live production shows | Above average |
| Carnival | Bad beds, good plugs | Good quantity, low quality, nuts! | Best comedy | Below average |
| MSC | Nice size, nice bathroom | Great quality, great quantity, no nuts | Terrible production shows, low quality | Below average |
| Cunard | Nice size, great beds, nice bathroom | Great quality, low quantity, nice salad bar | Great educational lectures | Excellent |
| Norwegian | Good beds, small bathroom | Low quality, low quantity, no nuts | Great live music in bars | Average |
| Holland America | Bad beds, bad plugs | Good quality, low quantity, few nuts. | Good educational lectures | Average |
Take the Which Is the Best Cruise Line for Me? Quiz
Despite the chart above, another way to pick a cruise line would be to take this quiz and follow the flow:
Do you want to Eat or Dine?
Dine: take Cunard, Holland America, Princess
Eat: take MSC, Norweigen, Carnival
Do you want lots of music/comedy/entertainment or do you like lectures and naturalist talks?
Music/comedy/entertainment: take Carnival, Princess, Norwegian
Education/Lectures: take Holland America, Cunard, Princess
Do you wants lots of organized activities or do you want to read a book?
Organized activities: take Carnival, Princess, Norweigen, MSC
Read a book: take Cunard, Holland America
Chris Englert, the Walking Traveler, believes walking is the platform for life. Wanderlusting since the age of 5, she’s since traveled all 50 US states and 62 countries. Chris shares her love of walking while traveling via blogs, books, and presentations. A natural storyteller, she invites you along as she explores the world, one walk at a time.
Currently, Chris and her husband, Steve, travel the world, full-time as nomads, with just their two carry-ons. They’ve been traveling since May, 2021.