Cruise Nation Review: Smart Packages, Fares and Who Holds the ATOL

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Cruise Nation was advertising 7-night no-fly cruises from £395 per person on 23 October 2026, with a free balcony upgrade thrown in, and MSC Cruises out of Southampton from £419 per person for the same length of sailing. Nine-night holidays with flights and a hotel started at £549, and a 21-night Music Cities itinerary at £1,799. Every price is per person on two sharing the lowest cabin grade.

The company behind those prices is Really Great Cruises Limited, number 06908517 on the UK register, incorporated on 18 May 2009 and still run from Suite 4c, Conwy House, Castle Court on Swansea Enterprise Park. Philip Richard Evans and Stephen Roy Boardman, the two men who started it, were both appointed directors on 6 August 2009 and are still the only two in post. Companies House files the business under SIC 79110, travel agency activities, which is the clue to how the rest of this works.

When Cruise Nation packages a cruise with flights and a hotel, the contract is not with Swansea. Its own booking conditions say it plainly: “Your contract will be with Hays Tour Operating Limited” and “When we package your holiday for you we act as agents of Hays Tour Operating Limited (ATOL 10531).” Hays Tour Operating is company 03591401, incorporated on 2 July 1998 at Gilbridge House, Keel Square, Sunderland — the tour operating arm of Hays Travel, which has run from a first branch in Seaham since 1980, now has more than 530 high street shops and reported transaction value of £3 billion in 2025. For a reader handing over a deposit to a Welsh company of two directors, that is the most reassuring sentence on the site, and it is buried in clause one of the terms.

What £395 buys, and what the small print takes back out

The Smart Package is the product Cruise Nation built its name on, and the inclusion list is specific rather than vague. The company says each one carries “your cruise, return flights, hotel stay, and all port taxes and fees, clearly listed upfront”, a pre- or post-cruise hotel stay with a star rating attached, a choice of cabin grade, full board in selected ship restaurants, hot drinks, iced tea, lemonade, juice and water in selected buffet venues, use of the pools, hot tubs and gym, and the evening entertainment. Port fees, taxes and surcharges sit inside the headline figure, which is not true of every cruise seller and is worth knowing before comparing two prices.

Port taxes being inside the price matters more than it sounds. On a cruise booked elsewhere those can be presented as an extra at checkout, so a £395 fare with them included is not competing on level terms with a £379 fare that adds them later. Cruise Nation also says there is “No Booking fee is payable when you book online”, and lets you pick a departure airport from regional options, add hotel nights either side of the sailing, or upgrade to a four or five star property, with all of it priced before checkout rather than after.

Two things are outside every one of those prices and the site states both. “Gratuities are not included in any of these offers unless otherwise stated”, and “Baggage charge may apply.” On a seven-night sailing, ship gratuities commonly run to the better part of £100 for two people, so a £395 fare is not the sum a couple will actually pay, and the baggage line is the only mention of hold luggage anywhere in the package description. Transfers between airport, hotel and ship are not listed among the inclusions either, and seat selection is not mentioned at all.

The lead-in prices also move between banners on a single screen. On 23 October 2026 the no-fly banner carried “7-night cruises from £395pp” without naming a ship or a sailing date, while the Cruise Line of the Week panel on the same page read “Right now you can set sail with MSC Cruises from Southampton with 7-night sailings from just £419pp”. Both are seven nights, both sail from the UK, and the £24 between them is unexplained. The deal listings themselves are drawn by JavaScript and did not render on any fetch, so a lower fare may well sit behind the search; what is quotable is what the home page itself puts in front of a reader.

The contract is with a company in Sunderland, and that is good news

Clause one of the booking conditions does something most travel sites avoid, which is to name the principal. “Your contract will be with Hays Tour Operating Limited”, and Cruise Nation “act as agents of Hays Tour Operating Limited (ATOL 10531)”. The footer of every page repeats it: “Package holidays are sold by Cruise Nation as an agent for Hays Tour Operating Limited, ATOL 10531.”

Hays Tour Operating Limited is company 03591401 on the UK register, incorporated on 2 July 1998, registered at Gilbridge House, Keel Square, Sunderland SR1 3HA. It is the licensed tour operator inside Hays Travel, which calls itself “the UK’s largest independent travel agent” and has the trading history to argue it: a first shop opened in Seaham, County Durham in 1980, turnover through £500 million in 2012, past £1 billion in 2018 and £2 billion in 2024, transaction value of £3 billion in 2025, more than 530 branches, 2,500 former Thomas Cook staff re-employed in 2019 and 631 apprentices appointed in 2024.

ATOL 10531 is a licence of real size. The Civil Aviation Authority’s own ranked report of the largest ATOL holders, dated 29 November 2022, put Hays Tour Operating Ltd 36th with 59,692 licensed passengers. Set that against the 1,624 businesses the CAA said were licensed under ATOL in its release of 7 October 2026, and against the 20 million ATOL protected holidays it counted to the end of August 2026, and the shape is clear: the money behind a Cruise Nation Smart Package is sitting behind one of the larger licences in the country rather than a small one.

The Swansea company’s own filings are thinner, which is the other half of the picture. Really Great Cruises Limited files as a private limited company with last accounts made up to 31 December 2024 and the next set, to 31 December 2025, due by 30 September 2026. Crestvill Limited (05651282) was its registered person with significant control, holding more than 25% but not more than 50%, from 6 April 2016 until 31 December 2022; since a statement filed on 30 April 2023 the company has recorded no registrable person or legal entity at all, meaning no single holding now reaches the 25% threshold. The about page offers no headcount and no customer total either, only that the team has “more than 400 years combined experience in the travel industry”.

ATOL, ABTA and the cruise with no flight on it

This is where the site and its own paperwork part company, and it is the single most useful thing on this page. Under “Why Cruise Nation?” the home page states: “All holidays are fully ATOL protected. We are members of ABTA, so your booking is safe”. The booking conditions say the opposite twice. Clause 1.1: “ATOL protection does not apply to all holidays and travel services listed on this website.” Clause 17: “Not all holiday or travel services offered and sold by us will be protected by the ATOL Scheme.” Both are Cruise Nation’s own words, published on its own domain on the same day, and they cannot both be right.

The terms are the ones that match the law. ATOL covers flight-inclusive packages. The Civil Aviation Authority describes it as financial protection for a package trip that includes a flight, and the scheme does not reach a cruise with no flight attached. So the cheapest fare on the whole site — that £395 no-fly, seven-night sailing — is precisely the booking an ATOL certificate does not cover, while the banner three inches above it promises every holiday is fully ATOL protected. Clause 1.2 gives the reader the only reliable test there is: “When you buy an ATOL protected flight or flight inclusive holiday from us you will receive an ATOL Certificate”, and clause 1.1 adds that “If you do not receive an ATOL Certificate then the booking will not be ATOL protected.” Ask for the certificate, and if none arrives, the protection is not there.

The ABTA half of that sentence needs the same unpicking. A cruise with no flight falls under the Package Travel and Linked Travel Arrangements Regulations 2018, where a seller may protect the money by an ABTA bond, by financial failure insurance or by a trust account. ABTA’s own guidance is blunt about what membership alone does for a customer of an agent: where you book with an ABTA travel agent, “you cannot claim from the financial protection scheme administered by ABTA”, and “If the ABTA member did not financially protect your travel arrangements, you won’t be able to submit a claim to ABTA.” Cruise Nation is filed as a travel agency and describes itself as an agent. Its ABTA membership is a code of conduct and a route to arbitration; it is not, by ABTA’s own account, the thing that protects a deposit.

None of which makes a no-fly cruise unprotected. It makes the protection somebody else’s — the principal’s bond or trust arrangement — and Cruise Nation publishes no ABTA membership number anywhere on the site, so a reader cannot look it up. ABTA has been going for more than 75 years and says 89% of people are more likely to book with a member than not, which is exactly why the number is worth printing. Two safety nets exist regardless: a credit card payment between £100 and £30,000 brings section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act into play, and the 2018 regulations themselves cover the package, though ABTA notes that arrangements of under 24 hours or booked for business travel may fall outside them.

Deposits, balances and the price of running late

The money mechanics are set out in the terms rather than on the sales pages, and they reward reading. The deposit is described only as “A non-refundable deposit, to be advised per passenger”, with no figure attached anywhere in the conditions; the only numbers published are promotional, with the Summer 2027 banners quoting “low deposits from £103pp” and monthly payments “from £54pp per month”. Against that banner’s own lead-in fare of £689 per person, a £103 deposit is about 15% of the holiday, and eleven payments of £54 on top would come to £697 — eight pounds more than the advertised fare, which is this page’s arithmetic rather than Cruise Nation’s and the kind of sum worth doing on the confirmation invoice. The flexible payment option is available only on cruises departing in six months or more.

The balance falls due on the date printed on the confirmation invoice, which the terms say can be as much as 28 weeks before departure — roughly six and a half months of the money sitting with the operator. Miss it and the charges are fixed and published: £35 if payment lands 3 to 6 days late, £75 at 7 to 9 days late, and £20 per named person on a booking held under a Low Deposit Agreement. Changing your mind costs £25 per change per person, and transferring a booking to someone else is another £25 per person plus any increase in cost.

Cancelling is where the exposure sits. The terms say charges rise the nearer departure gets, but publish only one point on that curve: “a cancellation made within 50 days incurs a 100% cancellation fee.” Fifty days is early by the standards of most package holidays, and no graduated scale is given, so a customer cancelling at 60 or 70 days out cannot work out their liability from the website at all.

Clause 7 lets Cruise Nation pass on cost increases “up to an increase of 8% of the holiday price”, which on that £689 fare is £55. Clause 7.1 then sets out a rule that runs one way only: “Should the same holiday be advertised at a higher price, we will not contact you for more money”, and “should the same holiday be advertised at a lower price, no refund of the difference will be provided.” The first half protects the customer, the second half protects the seller, and the pairing is at least stated openly rather than left to be discovered.

When the company cancels or makes a significant change, compensation is tabulated per passenger across two scales. More than 56 days before departure it is nil on both. At 56 to 43 days it is £10 on Scale A and nil on Scale B; 42 to 29 days, £20 and £10; 28 to 15 days, £25 and £10; 14 days or fewer, £30 and £15. The ceiling of £30 is 7.6% of that £395 lead-in fare, so the compensation table is a gesture rather than a remedy — the refund rights under the 2018 regulations are what actually matter if a holiday is cancelled.

A 4.9 out of 5 that rests on 727 ratings, not 12,118

Cruise Nation uses Feefo, which independently collects feedback and says its “platform only reaches out to verified buyers” and that it verifies reviews “by matching them to a sale or transaction”. That makes the score meaningfully better evidence than an open review page anyone can post to, and the score itself is strong: a service rating of 4.9 out of 5, labelled EXCEPTIONAL.

The about page presents it as “a Feefo rating of 4.9/5 based on 12,118 verified reviews”. Feefo’s own page is more precise, and the difference is worth a paragraph. It displays all 12,118 reviews, but the star distribution sitting beside the 4.9 covers 727 ratings over the past year: 648 at five stars, 70 at four, 3 at three, 2 at two and 4 at one. Score those five down to one and take a plain average and the answer is 4.87, which rounds to the published 4.9 — so the headline figure is an unweighted mean of the last twelve months, not of the 12,118 reviews it is quoted against. Those 727 ratings are 6.0% of that total. This is arithmetic done on Feefo’s own published distribution, not a figure either company states.

What the distribution does show is a genuinely good recent record. Five-star ratings are 89.1% of the past year, and everything at three stars or below comes to nine ratings, or 1.2%. A seller shifting cruise packages at these prices with a one-in-eighty rate of mediocre-or-worse feedback is doing something right, and that is the honest reading of the number. The looser claim on the same pages is harder to stand behind: “Voted the UK’s number 1 cruise holiday company - over 720,000 can’t be wrong” and “Voted World’s No.1 cruise booking website” name no poll, no awarding body and no year, and 720,000 is not a figure that appears anywhere else on the site or in any filing.

Awards from four cruise lines, and not one of them named

The about page says the business grew “from being a small start up business to an award winning tour operator” and that “we have won awards from four different cruise lines, as well as awards for our innovation within the cruise market and our digital presence.” No cruise line is named, no award is named, and no year is given for any of them. The only specific award reference anywhere on the site is a blog headline, “Cruise Nation Nominated at British Travel Awards 2017”, which is a nomination nine years old rather than a win.

That is a shame, because the verifiable parts of the story are decent. The company dates itself to 2009, which Companies House confirms to the day, and it put its own booking platform live in 2017 so that Smart Packages could be bought online for the first time — a non-trivial thing for a two-director company in Swansea to build in a market where the large sellers buy their technology. The about page lists 20 cruise line brands it works with, including MSC Cruises, Norwegian Cruise Line, Princess, Cunard, P&O Cruises, Celebrity, Carnival, Oceania, Costa, Royal Caribbean and Virgin Voyages, and claims “over 200+ destinations worldwide”. Against its own observation that there are “more than 30 cruise lines out there”, 20 is a real proportion of the market and a checkable number, which is more than any of the award claims manage.

There is no independent rating of a UK cruise seller from anybody. Defaqto does not rate travel websites, Smart Money People has no listing, and the tourist board assessment schemes grade properties rather than agents. So the Feefo distribution above, the Companies House record and the ATOL report are the whole of the external evidence available on this company, and a page that pretends otherwise is guessing.

Where 2.54 million British cruises actually went last year

The market Cruise Nation sells into had its best year on record. Cruise Lines International Association’s UK and Ireland release of 22 April 2026 counted 2.54 million ocean cruises taken by British and Irish passengers in 2025, against a previous high of 2.4 million in 2024 — a rise of about 5.8%. The Mediterranean took 34.5% of those passengers, northern Europe 27.2% and the Caribbean 13.7%. The average cruise ran 9.6 days and the average passenger was 54.6 years old. Andy Harmer, managing director of CLIA UK and Ireland, put it as “Cruise continues to appeal to a wide range of holidaymakers”, with more children sailing than ever.

Two of those numbers bear directly on how Cruise Nation’s shop window is arranged. The 9.6-day average sits between its seven-night lead-ins and its nine-night packages, so the two cheapest tiers on the home page are aimed squarely at the middle of the market rather than at the long voyages that fill a brochure. And northern Europe at 27.2% explains the no-fly banner: more than a quarter of British cruise passengers sail from a UK port, which is the fare that comes in lowest and also, as the section above sets out, the one ATOL does not touch.

Scale is worth keeping in proportion. The 59,692 passengers Hays Tour Operating was licensed to carry in the November 2022 ATOL report represent 2.4% of the 2.54 million ocean cruises taken in 2025, and that licence covers the whole of Hays Travel’s tour operating, not Cruise Nation alone. This is a specialist seller inside a large agency group, not a volume operator, and the pricing reads accordingly.

Nobody shows you the ship’s inspection score

Every ship on Cruise Nation’s 20 cruise lines that calls at a United States port is inspected, scored and published by a public health authority, and no cruise seller in Britain displays it. The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention runs a Vessel Sanitation Program whose own published account of the rules sets out the method: inspections are twice yearly and unannounced, scored out of 100, with a pass at 86 or higher and a re-inspection within 45 days of a failure. It applies to ships sailing from foreign to US ports carrying 13 or more passengers, and it is paid for by fees levied on gross registered tonnage.

That is the only independent, scored, repeated assessment of the actual ships in this market, and it is free to look up. The programme’s current per-ship report index returned a client error on 23 October 2026, so no individual score is quoted here rather than quoting one that could not be read. A reader with a ship name and a sailing in mind can search that index directly before paying a deposit, which is a better use of ten minutes than any brochure.

Nothing about this is a criticism of Cruise Nation in particular. It sells cabins on other companies’ ships and has no more access to a sanitation score than a customer does. It is simply the most useful thing a cruise buyer is never told, and the gap sits across the whole category rather than on one seller.

Figures were taken from each provider's own published terms on 23 October 2026. Variable rates can change at any time — confirm the current rate with the provider before applying.