I can't help you but I'll be really interested in the replies. It's something we would consider with our new little one.

It depends on the cruise line, the time of year and the destination. For a trip to the Med in August, or a trip over Christmas chances are you will pay close to full adult price. You need to see if it possible to pay full adult price and benefit from the discount of having three "adults" in a cabin.

Both our cruises were outside school holidays and discount for our daugther was 70% on both trips. One was in mid September, the other in mid June.

It's nothing to do with how much children eat, it's to do with supply and demand, just like it's cheaper to go on a package holiday on 1st july, than it is on 1st August.

And I would imagine that the food component of the cost is only a relatively small fraction of the total cost. If it incudes a flight to the port of embarkation then then it costs the same to run the plane regardless of whether it's filled full of adults or 50% of the seats are filled with kids. Similarly, the ships running costs, staffing etc are going to be the same regardless of the ages of the passengers. Where it's an AI package that includes alcohol for adults then I would hope that the child price would probably reflect this.

But as daveyjp says, sometimes the discount for a 3rd adult in a cabin or room is actually better than the discount you'd get if booking for 2 adults and a child. Don't ask me why - it just is in many cases where children on 'free' on discounted prices aren't counted when the company is calculating under-occupancy charges. When pricing up holidays when my nieces were both under 16, it was surprising how many times we paid less if we booked them in as adults rather than children - especially in the school holidays which we had to keep to.

SM

thankyou all for replies, we have trawled the net and kept an eye on the price,s for mid january, unfortunately no bargains, we have noticed the cruises have gone up this last week so we are plumping for a i in egypt instead then hopefully grab a cruise bargain in the summer