Our Methodology
We watch cruise videos so you don't have to. Here's how we turn thousands of YouTube reviews into simple, honest scores.
By the Numbers
Where the Data Comes From
Every score on Trip Bacon comes from real YouTube videos made by cruise creators — people who actually sail on these ships and share what they think. No surveys, no paid reviews, just real opinions from real cruisers.
We've published over 140,000 cruise videos in our catalog. If you tried to watch them all for 8 hours a day, it would take you about 7,676 days.
We do the watching so you get the scores.
How We Score
We listen to what cruise creators say about each ship and cruise line. We measure whether the overall feeling is positive, negative, or somewhere in between. That feeling gets turned into a BaconScore from -5 to +5.
A full +5 Happy Bacon means creators absolutely loved it. A full -5 Sad Bacon means they really didn't. A score of 0 is "Meh" — nobody had a strong opinion either way. The further from zero, the stronger the feeling.
Reading the Score
Scale: 0–5 strips in half-step increments. 0 = “meh”, 5 = “bacon bliss”. Aggregated from creator-review sentiment, weighted by channel expertise.
About our Bacon Score methodologyWhat We Track
We go deeper than just a single score. Every video gets linked to specific Cruise Lines, Ships, and Cruise Topics — plus 50+ sentiments covering the food, the entertainment, the cabins, and everything else a cruiser would want to know. We also track hashtags and trends so you can see what's hot right now.
One video is helpful. But we've watched them all and give you the full consensus of what millions of cruisers are watching — not just one person's opinion, but the collective voice of the entire cruise creator community.
What the BaconScore Badges Mean
On ship and cruise line pages, you'll also see a percentage badge. This shows how many creators recommend that ship or cruise line overall.
Not all opinions carry equal weight. We rank every creator based on how much cruising content they produce on their channel — from casual tourist to true authority. We also automatically detect promotions and sponsorships, and downgrade those sentiments accordingly so paid content doesn't inflate scores.
For the Data Science Nerds
Trip Bacon is the richest source of cruise sentiment analysis on the planet. Nobody else has what we have. We are indexing and analyzing every YouTube cruise video going back to 2006, when creators published their very first cruise content. Our master catalog has over 850,000 videos, and we're working through the backlog to determine which ones are cruise-related and which are not. We score 100% of those cruise videos one by one, then aggregate the results to produce our BaconScores and sentiment analysis. The stats you see on our site are live and recalculating every hour. When we finish processing the backlog, we estimate 450,000 to 500,000 cruise-only videos will be on our site.
Sentiment analysis at scale is hard. YouTube creators don't speak in clean data — they use sarcasm, hyperbole, tangents, and inside jokes. We use AI, machine learning, and enterprise-grade data engineering practices to turn messy human language into reliable scores. Here's how we tackle the biggest challenges:
| Challenge | Our Approach |
|---|---|
| Sarcasm and irony can flip the meaning of a sentence | Multi-pass contextual analysis that evaluates tone against surrounding context, not just individual phrases |
| Sponsored content may skew positive | Transparency detection flags sponsored, comped, and press sailings — weighted separately from independent reviews |
| One loud voice can dominate a score | Creator expertise tiers and channel weighting ensure authority voices carry appropriate influence without drowning out newcomers |
| Sentiment changes over time as ships age or get refurbished | Temporal decay and trend detection surface recent sentiment shifts so scores reflect current reality, not ancient history |
| Low sample sizes produce unreliable scores | Confidence tiers suppress consensus data below minimum thresholds — we'd rather show nothing than mislead you |