Cruise Budget Planner

A cruise fare is the down payment, not the price. This planner costs the whole sailing the way it actually bills you: fare, port fees and taxes, gratuities worked out from your own rate, getting to the port — and then the onboard extras, excursion by excursion and package by package, that sink most cruise budgets.

The sample is honest about where it goes wrong. The fare came in UNDER budget — $2,350.00 estimated against $2,400.00 — and the trip still lands OVER its $4,600 cap by $226.00, because port fees crept up, the pre-cruise hotel crept up, and the extras counted $1,301.00 ($480.00 of excursions, $821.00 of packages — $185.86 for every day of sailing). One excursion, the $150.00 sunset catamaran, is marked Dropped: it appears in no total anywhere, and its price sits on a dropped line so the saving is visible instead of imaginary.

HOW IT WORKS
– ‘Cruise Costs’: each line carries what you BUDGETED beside your researched ESTIMATE, with a printed OVER / UNDER / ON BUDGET status per line. Gratuities calculate themselves from your settings — rate x travellers x nights ($16.00 x 2 x 7 = $224.00 on the sample).
– ‘Onboard & Extras’: excursions per port (port names in your own words) and packages as typed rows, each with a Booked / Planned / Dropped status. Dropped items are excluded from every total and totalled separately.
– The verdict: estimated total against your own cap, cost per person ($2,413.00 on the sample) and cost per day of sailing ($689.43).

WHAT’S INSIDE
– Budgeted vs estimated for every cruise cost line, with per-line statuses
– An extras engine with a dropped-item line — what you cut stays visible (sample: $150.00)
– Gratuities arithmetic from your own rate, party and nights
– A printed verdict vs your cap, plus per-person and per-day figures
– Plus the standard Expense Log, zero-based Monthly Budget, Dashboard and Monthly Summary tabs

Every fare, fee and rate in this workbook is an example setting you type — no cruise line’s real prices are stated anywhere in it.

How it works: the seven tabs are Start Here (your settings + step-by-step), the two feature tabs, Expense Log, Monthly Budget (zero-based), Dashboard and Monthly Summary. Yellow cells are the only places you type — every yellow value is your own entry. Formula cells are locked (password: sheetdaily, disclosed on the Start Here tab) and every formula is error-wrapped, so an untouched sheet reads blank instead of showing error codes. Instant download, ready for Excel and Google Sheets.

A note on the sample data: every price and date in this workbook is example data, typed in by hand to show you how the sheet behaves. Replace it with your own.