Move over Virgin Voyages, we're Celebrity Raccoons now

Ok so, we were die hard Virgin Voyages people. There are eleven Virgin posts on this blog and we meant every word of them at the time.

Then we tried Celebrity, and the thing that did it was a drinks package. Specifically £69 each a day for premium drinks & WiFi, which on Virgin you can only really get at Mega Rockstar money. That one difference is most of the reason we switched. Once we’d switched, we found five more.

The drinks package did most of the work

We’ll be honest, the drinks package is probably the biggest deciding factor in why we’ve moved to team Celebrity.

On our last sailing that came to £69 each a day, with the WiFi bundled in. Everything from the morning cappuccino to the whiskey nightcap, all in, no tab to think about. We’ve done the full sums on whether that’s a good deal in our drinks package post, and the short version is that it broke even on the alcohol alone before we’d counted a single coffee. If you want your own number rather than ours, the Celebrity drinks package calculator will work it out from what you actually drink.

Virgin doesn’t really do this. What Virgin does is a bar tab, and the unlimited version comes attached to a Mega Rockstar suite, which is a very different amount of money to £69 a day. Is that worth it? Yes, but not often, and that’s a whole other blog.

So on the drinks alone, Celebrity works out a lot cheaper for us. That was the thing that got us to try it. It isn’t the only thing that keeps us going back though.

Every Virgin ship is the same ship

This is the one that really did the damage, we were getting bored.

Virgin’s fleet is a set of sister ships. Same class, same layout, and in our experience the same food, the same bars, the same everything. The first time it’s brilliant. By the third sailing you’re walking into a bar you’ve already reviewed, ordering a drink you’ve already photographed, and it got repetitive.

Celebrity has several different classes of ship, and they genuinely aren’t the same. Different layouts, different restaurants, different things bolted onto the top deck. Booking a second Celebrity cruise doesn’t feel like rebooking the first one, and after a run of Virgin sailings that was a bigger deal to us than it probably sounds.

You do not get this on the other one.

Bigger ships, and it shows

The ships are bigger, and that flows into everything else.

More bars means a proper bar crawl is actually on the table, and we take that sort of thing seriously. More decks means more to explore on a sea day. More restaurants means dinner isn’t a rotation of four rooms you’ve already been round twice.

We did not get bored, which after the repetition point above was the thing we were most worried about.

Somewhere to actually sit down

This sounds like the dullest possible reason to change cruise line and it’s genuinely one of my favourites.

There are soo many great places to sit and relax on a Celebrity ship, and crucially they’re not all attached to a bar. Some are, and those are excellent. But there are also quiet corners with a view and nobody trying to sell you anything, which is exactly what you want at 4pm when you’ve had a day of it.

Virgin has some lovely spaces. It has fewer of them, and the good ones fill up. On Celebrity we were still finding new spots near the end of a ten night sailing, which tells you something about how many there are.

Some of the sitting down is more dramatic than other sitting down.

The pools are a different scale entirely

Much, much bigger pools. That’s it, that’s the section.

Alright, slightly more than that. Cruise ship pools have a reputation for being a bathtub with a hundred people in it, and the main pool here is a proper size with room to actually be in it. There are hot tubs cantilevered out over the side of the ship too, which is a much better place to watch a port go by than it has any right to be.

For scale, that’s the main pool and that’s still not all of the deck.

More ships means more places to go

Bigger fleet, more destinations, more chances to go somewhere new.

Virgin’s itineraries are decent but there aren’t many of them, because there aren’t many ships.

Celebrity has a much bigger fleet spread across a lot more of the world, so when we go looking for a sailing there’s an actual choice to make rather than picking the continent & date. For people who book around annual leave or around a dream destination, there’s real choice with Celebrity. We actually booked our first Celebrity Cruise because we were getting bored of floating around the same European ports and Caribbean Islands.

Wandering off to find somewhere new at midnight, on night eight.

What Virgin still does better

Right, the honest bit, because this isn’t a clean sweep.

The booking is a faff. Celebrity runs constant sales, promotions and dynamic pricing on everything, drinks packages and excursions included. That’s how we got £69 a day, but only because we checked the price most mornings for weeks and rebooked whenever it dropped. One week we rebooked four times, which tied up a fair chunk of money on the card until the refunds landed. Virgin’s pricing is far more straightforward. You book a thing, it costs the thing.

Gratuities, and this one is changing. “Tips included” genuinely used to be one of the nicest things about a Virgin sailing. They’re slowly changing this, which is just another reason we’re going off them. On Celebrity there’s a 20% gratuity added to every drink you buy outside a package, plus daily gratuities, so neither line is quite the deal the fare page suggests any more.

Adults only. Virgin is over 18s across the whole fleet. Celebrity isn’t, and that’s a real difference rather than a small one, so it’s worth knowing which side of it you sit on before you book. That said, the best way I’ve heard Celebrity described was a user on Reddit saying “Kids are technically allowed, but they’re not encouraged”, which is not only hilarious but pretty accurate. We didn’t see many kids. Unlike Royal Caribbean there’s not much for them to do, so any worries about kids running around or cannon balling into the pool quickly disappeared.

None of that moved us back. The booking faff is annoying rather than expensive, the gratuities gap has closed from Virgin’s side rather than ours, and the kids were a non-issue in practice. But if you’re weighing this up, those are the three to weigh.

Off the ship, drink still in hand. Priorities.

Quick answers

Is Celebrity Cruises better than Virgin Voyages? For us, yes, and mostly because of the drinks package. It cost us £69 a head per day on Celebrity, drinks and WiFi together, where the unlimited equivalent on Virgin comes attached to a Mega Rockstar suite. Add bigger ships, far more places to sit, much bigger pools and a fleet where the ships aren’t all identical, and we’ve ended up sailing almost exclusively with Celebrity.

Why did you stop cruising with Virgin Voyages? We didn’t fall out with it, we just fell a bit out of love with it after it got repetitive. Virgin’s ships are sister ships, so the food, the restaurants, the bars and the layout are much the same on each one. That’s fine, but after 7 sailings in 2 years we were ready for a change. I’m sure we’ll be back sailing Virgin Voyages again though.

Is Virgin Voyages still worth it? Yes, for the right trip. It’s adults only across the fleet and it’s a fantastic experience. The boats are beautifully designed, the events are the most fun and the happenings cast are unrivalled (except maybe by Debbie on Celebrity Solstice..) All our Virgin reviews are still up on the Virgin Voyages page and we stand by them.

Which is cheaper, Celebrity or Virgin Voyages? Celebrity works out cheaper for us, but only because of how we drink. A £69 per person per day drinks package is a big saving against paying per drink, and there’s no equivalent on Virgin short of booking a Mega Rockstar suite. If you barely drink, the sums look completely different and Virgin’s range of included restaurants is better than Celebrity’s included options.

Final verdict

Worth the switch. 4.5 out of 5.

We came for a drinks package and stayed for the bits we weren’t expecting, which were mostly the boring ones. Somewhere to sit. A pool you can swim in. A ship that isn’t the last ship. After a run of sailings where we knew the bar menu before we boarded, that turned out to be what we actually wanted.

The booking process is the weak point, and it’s a daft thing to have to be good at. Dynamic pricing means the good deal exists but you have to go and get it, repeatedly, and there’s something faintly ridiculous about checking a cruise line’s website with your morning coffee for two months. We do it anyway, because £69 a day.

If you’re a Virgin diehard reading this with your arms folded, we were you for seven sailings and a lot more blog posts. Go and price up a Celebrity sailing with the drinks package on, put it next to a Mega Rockstar fare, or whatever bar tab you add, and see which way your sums fall. Our calculator does the Celebrity half of that for you.

Prices are what we paid in August 2026. Things move, so check before you book.