Bar Tab calculator

How the model works

The drink rates start from Virgin's own marketing of the tab. A $225 tab is sold as 32 Heinekens, 25 glasses of wine, or 17 mojitos, which works out to about $7 a beer, $9 a glass of wine, and $13 a mojito. I round beer up to $8, inside the $7 to $9 Virgin lists for beer, and cocktails up to $14 to leave room for the pricier ones. That is still well under the inflated numbers on some calculators, and a rate set that runs 65 percent high pushes every user up a tier they do not need.

Drinking days are not the same as nights. On a port day you are ashore for part of it, and the bar tab does not follow you into a taxi. A port day counts as 0.85 of a sea day if you tend to stay aboard, and 0.60 if you tend to go out. The Beach Club at Bimini is the exception: the tab spends there, so it counts as a full day.

Quantities are asked per Sailor per day rather than as a cabin total. This is the single most common way these calculators go wrong. Ask a couple for a combined total and about half of them answer per person, then get told to buy half the tab they need.

Why prepaying works at all

The tab is not a drinks package. Every drink is the same menu rate whether or not you hold a tab, so there is no break-even against pay as you go. The only thing a tab changes is that Virgin adds a bonus when you buy it in advance, from 12.5 percent at the $200 tier to 25 percent at $1,000. That bonus is the entire product.

Which is why the risk is one-sided. Buy a tab smaller than you drink and you lose nothing: the overflow is charged at exactly the same rates. Buy a tab larger than you drink and the unused balance is not refunded at the end of the voyage. So the correct size is the largest tier whose purchase amount sits at or below the low end of your estimate, not the tier that matches your estimate.

What I could not verify

Three things are genuinely unresolved as of the verification date, and I would rather say so than guess:

• Whether one Sailor can pre-purchase more than one tab, and whether each would carry its own bonus. This calculator therefore recommends a single tier and never a stack of them.
• Whether a promotional Bar Tab is valid at The Beach Club at Bimini or onboard only.
• Whether each currently running promotional tab is allocated per cabin or per Sailor. Check your own confirmation rather than trusting a general answer.

A note on sharing

A Bar Tab is a pot assigned to one Sailor, and it is not transferable to another user. You can still buy a drink for another Sailor with it, and a cabin can link tabs at check-in or merge folios at Sailor Services so one pot covers everyone. That is what makes pooling work, and it is why a cabin of two should almost never buy two small tabs.