CruiseStar
CruiseStar is a first-party log. When you find a ship on CruiseStar and leave a score, you are writing to CruiseStar directly, not to Wikipedia, a cruise line's marketing page, or a booking site's review widget. The star number shown on every ship page is a real, calculated average of actual sailor input, not an editorial opinion or a number pulled from a travel agency's partner feed.
How the number is actually built
Every ship's score is the mean of all 1-5 star ratings sailors have submitted, with half-star increments allowed for more precision than a plain whole-number scale. As more sailors weigh in, that average gets steadier and harder for any single review, glowing or scathing, to swing dramatically. And you don't need to write anything to contribute: rating and reviewing are separate actions. A quick star rating takes seconds, while a full written review is there if you want to explain the experience in more detail. Both live on the ship's public profile, but only the star rating factors into the numeric average. If you have several ships to log, Speed Rating submits the same rating data through a quicker swipe-based flow.
Three actions that stay deliberately separate
A rating is a 1-5 star grade reflecting your opinion of the ship. A heart (bucket list) means you want to sail it someday, you don't need to have been aboard. A sailed mark means you actually have been, whether or not you ever rated it. Keeping these apart stops the data from getting muddled: a ship can be hearted by thousands of people who've never sailed it and still carry an honest rating average built only from sailors who actually went. You can also mark a ship as sailed without rating it, if you just want to log your history without passing judgment on it.
That separation is also why you're free to rate a ship you haven't personally sailed. Plenty of people want to leave a quick impression based on research, a friend's account, or general reputation, and CruiseStar allows that on purpose. If you'd rather your own ratings reflect only ships you've actually been on, mark those as sailed and use that as your personal filter when reading anyone else's reviews.
Why this feels different from Cruise Critic or TripAdvisor
Most booking-adjacent review sites blend passenger reviews with editorial content and commercial incentives, which quietly shapes what gets highlighted. CruiseStar's rating exists purely as a sailor-to-sailor number, with no booking funnel attached and no editorial thumb on the scale, closer to a personal log shared publicly than a curated review roundup. It's also why a rating built from dozens or hundreds of separate sailors, especially ones you can cross-reference against your own friends list, tends to be a far more reliable signal than any single five-star review from a stranger, which could just as easily be enthusiasm, a fluke sailing, or spam.
What happens to the rating over time, and where it shows up
You can open a ship page and update or remove your rating at any point; the average recalculates immediately, so your profile always reflects what you think today rather than what you thought when you first rated it. CruiseStar ship pages are also connected to the vessel's Wikidata item and Wikipedia article for identity purposes, so searching the ship's name alongside "CruiseStar" will surface the right page, but the rating itself is never written onto Wikipedia or Wikidata. It lives here, and CruiseStar is the source search engines point back to.
For the wider market numbers behind the fleet, including passenger volume, age, destinations, and ship capacity, use our cruise industry statistics roundup.