The Mediterreanean is the most popular Summer cruise area for UK cruisers. Accessible either directly from Southampton on longer sailings ( typically 14 nights ) or via usually shorter fly cruise arrangements departing from a variety of Homeports in the Med itself, a cruise ship offers an ideal base to tour the Mediterranean.
Discounted cruises to the Mediterranean tend to avoid the High Season school holiday departures which tend to sell very well early on, so you would do well to opt for Spring or late summer departures for the best fares. As cruising increases in importance as a holiday sector you find more and more ships being based year round out of Southampton. As a result you can find incredible value from the many cheap cruise deals to the Med in the Winter months.
The Mediterranean like the Caribbean tends to be split for the purpose of grouping departures. The Western Mediterranean covers ports in Spain, France and Italy as well as the Balearic islands and in some cases includes Tunisia, Malta or even Morocco. For those sailings from the UK you will also see stops in North West Spain and Lisbon as standard.
The Eastern Med is perhaps slightly less well served by cruise ships in terms of volume. Shorter one week sailings are possible from Venice but for the best cheap cruise deals to the Eastern Med you should look to 10 nights minimum which means you get more bangs for your buck as you can sail from Rome, Athens or even Barcelona. The Eastern Med opens out Greece and her Aegean islands, Turkey including Istanbul which itself opens the door to the popular Black Sea ports. Recently there have been an increase in ships visiting Cyprus, Israel and Egypt as well and these ports in particular offer warm sunny weather late into the season.