How VoyageDNA works

It's a deterministic score, not an AI opinion

VoyageDNA doesn't ask a language model what it thinks you'd like. Your answers are run through a fixed scoring method: each of the 13 preference dimensions you rate (family time, luxury, dining, nightlife, relaxation, and so on) is compared against the same, consistently-rated dimensions on all 231 ships, and combined into a single match score. Give the same answers twice and you get the same result twice — nothing is generated, reworded, or reinterpreted by a model in between.

A few things you tell us — like traveling with kids, cruise lines to avoid, or a target price range — aren't scored at all. They're hard filters: a ship that doesn't meet them is removed from consideration entirely, not down-ranked.

Confidence is a separate signal from match quality

A high match percentage and high confidence aren't the same claim. Match percent answers "how well does this ship fit what you told us." Confidence answers "how much should you trust this specific result," and comes from three things looked at together:

• How much you told us. A fully answered questionnaire supports more confidence than a partial one.
• Whether your priorities actually agree. If your highest-weighted preferences point in different directions, no ship can satisfy all of them equally well, and confidence reflects that tension honestly rather than hiding it.
• How far ahead the top pick is. If the #2 ship scores almost identically to #1, that's a genuinely close call, and confidence is lower even though the match percent might look strong.

We'd rather tell you a result is a reasonable starting point than overstate it as a sure thing.

Every "why" traces back to something you answered

The reasons shown with a recommendation aren't generic marketing copy — they're generated from the specific dimensions you rated highest, the specific ship attributes that scored well against them, and (where it's genuinely true) the specific reasons a close alternative ranked just below it. When a ship is a compromise on something you said mattered, we say so, in the same place as the strengths, not buried in fine print.

Data honesty: verified, derived, or left blank — never invented

Ship and cruise-line facts come from a mix of editorial research and, where noted, official cruise-line sources with a visible confidence level and, when available, a source link. Some attributes (like a specific ship's entertainment mix) are reasonably derived from a cruise line's general pattern rather than individually confirmed — those are labeled as derived, lower-confidence information, not stated as fact. If we don't have reliable information about something, we leave it out of a ship's page rather than guess.

Recommendations aren't for sale

Ranking is based only on how well a ship matches your answers. VoyageDNA has no advertising or paid-placement system, and no cruise line or travel partner can pay to rank higher or be excluded. If you opt in to being contacted by a travel advisor after seeing your results, that's a separate, explicit choice you make — it never changes which ship was recommended or why.