‘Cost’ here is fuzzy. The operating cost for the cruise is already fixed. The food&bev cost per stateroom is minuscule in this scale…. So an empty stateroom is literally just a hole in customer spending. You can talk about the overhead cost divided by the number of staterooms as their ‘cost’ but it doesn’t really work here because you’re likely comparing filling empty rooms instead of comparing to non-discounted guests.
It's still a start. And, if we're comparing it to empty rooms, it still creates a question about if they voyage was going to lose, break even, or be profitable with that room empty.
Technically, they could sell one super luxury stateroom at $500,000 and then 99 rooms at $1. But, that's not really going to happen either.
I would assume someone at Disney did the math already to determine how much that fixed cost is, how many rooms they can be sure to sell (not all of them), and then did that exact math of cost divided by rooms sure they'll sell to get a price. Every room after that would be almost all profit then. Even that is probably too simple for the math.
The discount rate still gives us a clue that the current rate includes lots of margin. A margin that could be reduced if necessary to drive more sales. Not likely a 50% reduction, but if the price comes down 10% at some point, and then 10% more at another later time, that wouldn't be surprising and likely still provide plenty of profit margin.
Will it ever come down low enough to get the All Stars guest to stay there? Not likely. But, they sell a lot of Deluxe rooms, low enough to entice that crowd is certainly possible.
