What a World Cruise Actually Costs in 2028

This fall I am experiencing a first. My youngest child is going abroad for school, and my husband and I will officially be empty nesters.

It is a bittersweet time of life. I raised four kids over the past twenty five years and it has been the joy of my life. Now I am looking at this man next to me and thinking, what's next for us?

I think a lot of you are in the same boat. And yes, I heard it as I typed it.

But that is the moment, isn't it. The kids go, the house gets quiet, and a trip around the world stops being something other people do and turns into something you could actually plan.

Last month I priced a private jet around the world. The response was lovely, but I was asked a very good question: what if you're a cruise person?

So I went and looked properly. One suitcase, unpacked once. Forty nine places. No airports, no repacking, no five in the morning departures. And a price that is nothing like what people guess.

What does a world cruise cost?

The 2028 Coral Princess world cruise sails 115 nights, round trip from Fort Lauderdale, January 3 to April 28. The fare starts at $17,798 US per person with taxes included, about C$24,738, based on two people sharing an interior stateroom.

That is $155 US a night, roughly C$215. It covers the room, every meal, the entertainment and your transport between forty nine places on five continents.

For comparison, a mid range hotel room in downtown Toronto runs more than $155 a night and does not move.

What the fare does not cover

This is the part I care about, because the brochure number is not the number you will actually spend, and four months multiplies every small daily charge into a real one.

Here is the honest build, using published rates where they exist and my own planning budgets where they do not. I have marked which is which.

Two lines on that list deserve a warning.

Shore excursions are the swing factor. Forty nine ports is a lot of chances to spend money. Ship tours average well over a hundred dollars a head, and in places like Auckland, Barcelona or Cape Town you can do better on your own for a fraction. Budget for about twenty guided days and walk the rest, and the number above holds. Book a tour in every single port and you can add ten thousand dollars without noticing.

Drinks and wifi packages are the trap. Princess Plus is $65 per person per day at the published rate. On a seven night cruise that is $455 and it is often good value. Over 115 nights it is $7,475, which is nearly half the fare again. World cruise guests are usually on a different arrangement, so this is a question to ask before you book rather than after, and it is the single biggest number most people never think to check.

Forty nine mornings, and what you actually see

Here is what I keep coming back to. On a trip like this you are never packing. You wake up, and the window has changed.

Out of Fort Lauderdale in early January. Cartagena, then the full canal transit. El Salvador, three stops down the Mexican coast, then Los Angeles.

Five days of open Pacific, and then Kauai and Honolulu. Cross the date line and lose a Tuesday. Apia in Samoa, Suva in Fiji.

Two days in Auckland, then Napier, Wellington and New Plymouth. Sydney on Valentine's Day. Melbourne, Adelaide, and across the Bight to Fremantle.

Then the long one. Nine days of Indian Ocean broken by Mauritius and Réunion, and then Port Elizabeth, Mossel Bay, and two whole days in Cape Town.

Up the Atlantic after that. Walvis Bay in Namibia, seven days of ocean, Cape Verde, Tenerife, Gibraltar. Then Sicily, Corfu, Dubrovnik, Split, Kotor, Athens, Ephesus, Crete, Salerno, Rome, Corsica, Cannes, Barcelona. Málaga, Cádiz for Seville, Tangier, Casablanca. Madeira, the Azores, and home.

The days at sea are the ones people talk about

I assumed the sea days were the price you paid for the ports. Everyone who has actually done one of these tells me the opposite.

There is a phrase these passengers use for the full voyage. They call it doing the world. On one recent circumnavigation, twelve hundred of the two thousand people aboard were doing the whole loop, and a great many of them had done it before, with the same people, the year before that.

Somebody teaches watercolour. Somebody else runs the bridge tournament. There are lectures on wherever you are going next, given by people who have spent their careers on it. There is a proper library. You cross the equator and they make an occasion of it.

And in the middle of all that, you and the person you spent twenty five years raising children with have breakfast together with nowhere to be. Which, if I am truthful, is the part I cannot stop thinking about.

Which world cruise is best?

It depends entirely on whether you want company or quiet, and the two 2028 departures go opposite ways around the planet.

Coral Princess is the Pacific way. 115 nights, Fort Lauderdale round trip, from $17,798 US. A big ship with plenty of people on it, the classic route, two nights each in Cape Town and Auckland, and ten late nights in port so you actually get an evening somewhere rather than being back aboard by six.

Silver Shadow is the Atlantic way. 132 nights, Miami to Nice, from $76,500 US or about C$106,332, which is $580 a night. Down the length of South America, the Chilean fjords, Patagonia, Ushuaia at the bottom of the world, the Falklands, Buenos Aires, Rio during Carnaval. Then St Helena, which is one of the most remote inhabited islands on earth and which almost nobody gets to. Namibia, Cape Town, the Seychelles, Arabia, Petra, Luxor, up through the Suez and into the Mediterranean.

What the higher fare buys is not a bigger room. It is 390 guests against 302 crew, every room a suite with a butler, a shore excursion included every single day, all meals and drinks, laundry, gratuities and a hotel night before you sail. Seventeen overnights, so you sleep in places rather than waving at them.

One thing to know about that ship. Silver Shadow was built in 2000 and last had a major refit in 2019, so she is the older half of the Silversea fleet. The crew get consistently praised. Some of the public rooms read dated next to the newer ships. On a four month voyage I would take the crew.

Can you sail just part of a world cruise?

Yes, and this is how most people actually do it.

Silversea has cut its 2028 world cruise into nine segments of ten to nineteen nights, starting around $5,000 US per person. Holland America sells a thirty five night leg from Fort Lauderdale to Sydney from $7,999 US, which takes in the full canal transit, the equator, Easter Island, a cruise past Pitcairn Island, Tahiti, Moorea, Bora Bora, Fiji and New Caledonia, and drops you in Australia.

That last one is $229 a night for what most people would call the trip of a lifetime, and it is five weeks rather than four months.

The full circumnavigation is the dream. A segment is a very good holiday. There is no shame in the second one.

Can you work from a world cruise?

Three years ago the answer was no. Now it is a logistics question.

Low earth orbit satellites changed the physics. Independent speed tests across the major fleets through 2025 and 2026 show downloads between 50 and 200 Mbps, uploads between 8 and 25, and latency between 35 and 70 milliseconds. A stable video call needs about 10 Mbps and under 150 milliseconds, so the ships clear it with room to spare.

Two caveats if you are planning to keep working. Uploads are the weak link on some ships, and uploads are what carry your face on a call, so that is the specific number to ask about. And there are regulatory blackout zones around India, China, parts of Southeast Asia and the Middle East where service drops out. I check both against the itinerary before anyone commits.

When do you have to book a world cruise?

Earlier than feels reasonable.

Silversea's five most expensive suite categories on that 2028 sailing were waitlisted sixteen months before departure. One ultra luxury line's entire 2028 world cruise is waitlisted with seventeen months still to go.

These voyages open to past guests first and reach everyone else a few days later, by which point the good inventory is thin. World cruise bookings are also up more than twenty percent year over year at one large seller, and the buyer has shifted from retired couples to people in their fifties who still work.

Which means the planning horizon here is two to three years, not two to three months. If four months away is something you want to be true of your life in 2028, it is a decision for this year.

Why this one is personal

I have priced a lot of trips this year. This is the first one I have caught myself reading at eleven at night for reasons that have nothing to do with work.

Four months is a long time. It is also the first stretch of my adult life where nobody needs me to be anywhere on a Tuesday.