Princess Plus vs Princess Premier: Which Package Is Worth It in 2026?

Princess Cruises has just reshuffled its Plus and Premier packages for 2026, and the price for both has gone up. We haven't sailed with Princess ourselves, so we can't tell you which bar server makes the best espresso martini on Sun Princess. What we can do is walk you through exactly what each package includes this year, what changed, and which one actually makes sense for the way you cruise.

The three ways to book a Princess cruise

Princess sells fares in three tiers now: Standard, Plus, and Premier. Standard is just the cruise fare with nothing bundled in, so you pay for drinks, Wi-Fi and specialty dining as you go. Plus and Premier bolt everything into one daily rate, charged per person, for the first two guests in a cabin.

The idea is simple. You prepay for what you'd likely spend anyway, at a lower rate than paying individually. Whether that maths works for you depends entirely on how you actually holiday.

What's in Princess Plus for 2026

Princess Plus costs $65 per person, per day, if you buy it before you sail. Buy it onboard or within four days of departure and it jumps by $5 a day per person. On the new Sun Princess and Star Princess, the rate is $70 a day pre-cruise.

For that you get 15 drinks a day up to $15 each, covering cocktails, wine, beer, spirits and fizzy drinks. Specialty coffee and tea are unlimited and don't count against that 15-drink cap, a change Princess made this year after guests complained the old system ate into their allowance too fast. You also get four casual dining meals per person for the whole voyage, one device of Wi-Fi, free OceanNow delivery, free room service, and daily crew appreciation (the gratuity) folded into the price.

Princess quietly dropped a few things from Plus to make room for the extra dining: premium desserts, juice bar access, fitness classes and the small prize giveaways are all gone. None of them will change your holiday much, but it's worth knowing they're not there any more if you remember them from a previous cruise.

What's in Princess Premier for 2026

Premier is the bigger spend at $100 a day pre-cruise ($105 on Sun and Star Princess), rising to $105 if you leave it to book onboard. It includes everything Plus does, then adds the parts that matter to people who eat and drink more, or who just want to stop thinking about the bill.

Drinks are uncapped rather than limited to 15, and the ceiling per drink rises to $20. Casual dining is unlimited rather than four meals, and specialty restaurants like the steakhouse or Italian venue are included with no per-visit cover charge. Wi-Fi covers four devices instead of one. You get unlimited digital photos from the ship's photographers plus three prints, reserved seating for the theatre shows, and a shore excursion credit that scales with cruise length: $100 on a six to nine night sailing, $200 on ten to twenty nights, and up to $300 on anything longer.

That shore excursion credit is new for 2026 and it's the detail most worth knowing about. On a ten-night cruise, $200 per person covers a fair chunk of a couple's excursion budget before you've spent a penny of your own money.

Is the extra $35 a day actually worth it?

This is the sort of thing worth asking an agent to run the numbers on, since the right answer changes with the length of your cruise and how many specialty dinners you'd actually book anyway.

Rough version: if you'd order two or three drinks a day and eat in the main dining room most nights, Plus covers you comfortably and Premier is money left on the table. If you're the sort of couple who'll book two specialty restaurants in a week, drink more than 15 measures between you most days, or want the shore excursion credit and don't fancy paying for Wi-Fi on four devices separately, Premier tends to work out cheaper than buying those things one at a time.

Families travelling with children under 21 should check the fine print too. Under-21s aren't eligible for the alcohol side of either package and pay a reduced non-alcoholic rate instead, which changes the sums for a family cabin quite a bit.

Our take

Neither package is free money, whatever the marketing says about 50 to 70 percent savings. Those numbers assume you'd have bought every component separately at full onboard price, which most people wouldn't. The honest question is whether your actual drinking and dining habits on a typical cruise day add up to more or less than the daily package rate.

For a shorter Caribbean sailing with modest drinking and one or two casual dinners a night, Plus usually wins. For a longer voyage, a special-occasion cruise, or anyone who wants the shore excursion credit and specialty dining without watching a running tab, Premier starts to make more sense.

We book Princess sailings for people every week and we're happy to run the Plus versus Premier numbers against your actual itinerary before you commit either way. Get a free quote and we'll tell you honestly which one suits your cruise, not just which one Princess would rather sell you.