Fred. Olsen Cruise Lines has halved the price of its premium drinks package on a range of autumn and winter sailings — from £20 per person per night instead of the usual £40 — for new bookings made by 30 July.
The offer covers selected cruises aboard all three ships — Bolette, Borealis and Balmoral — departing between October 2026 and January 2027, spanning winter-sun runs to southern Spain and the Canaries as well as Mediterranean fly-cruises.
The package includes cocktails, premium spirits, wines, beers, soft drinks and alcohol-free options throughout the cruise, so at £20 a night it starts paying for itself somewhere around the second drink of the evening.
The sailings worth a look
Among the featured cruises is Balmoral’s 11-night ‘Country Hopping from Greece to Tenerife’ fly-cruise departing 19 November (from £1,309 with UK flights and transfers included) — the newly added itinerary we’ve covered in detail here, taking in Valletta, Sicily, Cartagena, Gibraltar and Agadir.
From the north of England, Bolette’s 14-night ‘Canary Islands & Madeira’ cruise departs Liverpool on 7 December (from £1,549), calling at Porto’s port of Matosinhos, Funchal, La Palma, Tenerife and Vigo — with a lovely bit of timing: the sailing coincides with the Geminid meteor shower, one of the year’s most reliable displays, best watched from a dark deck in the mid-Atlantic where light pollution is essentially nil.
And for a January escape, Balmoral’s 13-night ‘Southern Spain & Portugal’ cruise departs Southampton on 20 January 2027 (from £1,299), a no-fly round trip calling at Vigo, Gibraltar, Málaga, Matosinhos for Porto and — the highlight — two full days in Cádiz, with time for tapas, flamenco or the day trip to Seville.
Why it matters for UK cruisers
Phil Gardner, Fred. Olsen’s commercial and product director, says “this offer adds even more appeal to our autumn and winter cruises” — and on the numbers, a drinks package at half price genuinely shifts the total-cost calculation that matters more than any headline fare, as our guide to finding genuine cruise deals explains.
On a 14-night sailing, the saving against the full-price package is £280 per person — worth more than many headline fare discounts. The deadline is firm, though: the half-price rate applies to new bookings made by 30 July only.
Image: Fred. Olsen Cruise Lines
