Checking cruise prices yourself costs nothing. Open the cruise line's site, find your sailing, select your cabin category and guest count, and compare against what you paid. It takes a couple of minutes and it works.
The question is not whether it works. It is whether it keeps working for eleven months.
What doing it by hand actually involves
To produce a claimable comparison you have to reach the same configuration every time: the exact ship, the exact sail date, the exact stateroom category, the same number of guests. That is several clicks deep on every cruise line's website, and most of them reset your selections between visits.
Then you have to do it repeatedly, because a fare that drops and recovers within a week is invisible to somebody checking monthly. And you have to keep doing it through the period you are most likely to stop: the quiet middle months between booking and final payment.
Where it tends to fail
- Duration. Cruises are often booked nine to twelve months out. Habits do not reliably survive that long.
- Timing. Prices move at any hour. Checking on Sunday evenings finds Sunday evening prices.
- The deadline. Most lines stop repricing at final payment. Missing a drop by a week can cost the entire difference.
- Matching. It is easy to compare against the wrong category and conclude the fare fell when it did not, or the reverse.
What CruiseSignal does differently
It checks the same exact configuration continuously rather than when you remember, it filters out the fare types lines commonly exclude, and it tells you which program the drop falls under and how long you have to file.
What it does not do is claim anything for you. Cruise lines require the booking holder or their travel agent to submit the request, so the phone call is yours either way. The difference is knowing there is a call worth making.
When checking by hand is the better choice
If your cruise sails within a few weeks, you enjoy checking, and you have one booking rather than several, doing it by hand is free and perfectly adequate. The same is true if you booked a fare type that is excluded from price protection anyway, because there is nothing to claim no matter who is watching.
Past that, it comes down to whether you will genuinely check every few days for a year. Most people will not, and the cost of finding out which one you are is the drop you did not catch.
