A cruise-based search engine has crunched the numbers and announced that Thursday is the best day of the week to get a bargain on your next cruise.

The German-based cruisewatch.com website analysed the statistics of more than 600,000 cruise price reductions over the last five years as part of their ‘price drop monitoring’ service, and found that the most discounts are released on a Thursday. Yet only a day earlier, Wednesday, is when cruise package prices are hiked up the most – 34 per cent more often, in fact.

The quietest time for both price hikes and drops is on the weekend, with Sunday being reported as the slowest day in terms of price activity. Only 7.8 per cent of the industry’s price drops happen on that day, compared to 17 per cent on Thursdays. Monday is also a slow day, with only 12 per cent of the week’s price drops happening then.

Britta Bernhard, the website’s cofounder, says that the flow of supply and demand has a direct effect on cruise prices. “Most people do not realise that they can save massive amounts of money by booking at the right time,” she adds.

Cruisewatch.com monitors more than 10,000 sailings, read through over 100,000 online reviews and offer a complimentary service that provides a live automated update of cruise price ‘drops’ via their website.

“When a sailing is not sold out, most cruise lines will discount the cabins rather than sailing empty,” Ms Bernhard continues. “But you need to find them and book quickly.”

That suggests that the price drops on the site are mostly last-minute bookings, but that is not so. The price drop feed might feature a cruise in two weeks’ time right alongside a discounted sailing well into 2018.

The website uses ‘intelligent big data algorithms’ to come up with their live feeds of not only price drops but notifications of the best deals available at any given time. They filter through industry and consumer reviews of ships and cruisings to find a value rating to reflect historic customer satisfaction. These then combine with factors such as prices and itinerary lengths to produce the top 10 per cent of cruise package deals.

Although these feeds are live only, there is now a price prediction service available only to users who have signed up as members. Cruisewatch offers a ’75 per cent confidence’ rate on its predictions, for potential passengers wanting to monitor their favourite sailings in the future.

“Cruise lines invest massive amounts of resources into revenue optimisation,” argues Ms Bernhard. “We are levelling the playing field and offering consumers up-to-date technology to make the right decisions.”