mromero07

Anyone knows if Carnival still allows to charge casino chips to your sail and sign card without charging a fee or ringing it up as a cash advance?

UnitedFlyGuy

Sailed with them last October. Used sail and sign card. No fee. The system has gotten really nice.

mromero07

No cash advance, correct?

pseudoswede

Sailed with them three weeks ago.

It is a 3% charge to use your Sign & Sail card to get casino chips, and a 5.5% surcharge if you want to use your credit card to get cash! If you plan on taking out more than $200, then the on-board ATM might be a better deal ($6 fee, not including your local bank's fees).

However! If your ship has an electronic PokerPro table, you can simply buy in for $30-200, fold a few hands (or simply buy-in when no one else is around), quit, go to the casino cage, request to cash out your poker money, and you get your money in cash with no fees. Whether that's worth saving 3% or $6-ish is up to you. I paid for almost all of my incidentals (booze, laundry, Camp Carnival after-hours, and pictures) playing poker; one of the softest games I've ever played in.

brooklynmatt

That's a great idea on the poker game - have they also gone cashless gaming on the slots?

I haven't been on Carnival in years, but when I did there was the 3% fee in place for both tables (chips) and cash and its not the sort of thing that they would do away with, they aren't that sort of company.

If the OPs plan is to make airmiles then this isn't going to work, but if it is just to have access to cash on the cruise (without carrying it on the plane) then you can do a front money deposit at the cage, I believe that they accept Cashiers Checks (confirm with OPC who to draw it out to).

There is no 3% for Front Money, so you effectively create a bank in the casino for yourself, they may ask questions if you don't play, but I am sure you can stall them...

pseudoswede

They have, but I don't think there is a way to get hard cash out. Given how many people on CC are slot players, any method to extract cash without fees through slot machines would've been known/exploited by now.

That said, I was going to post my fee-free experience on CC, but, the more I think about it, I won't.

DanJ

As far as I know, Carnival hasn't clamped down on their player bank system on the slots. You simply put your cruise card in the slot machine, follow the instructions to create a player bank, deposit whatever amount you want from your shipboard account to your player bank, and play or cash out whenever you want. There is a daily limit of something like $2000, but it's fee free and is simply charged to your ship account, which is then charged to your credit card.

It's been this way for at least 6 years, across all the Carnival family of cruise lines (Princess, Holland America, P&O, Costa etc). One would think this is easily abused and therefore Carnival would cut down on it, but I think they make so much off of people who gamble more this way that they find it worth it for people who use the system as a mile-earning ATM.

pseudoswede

A quick search on CC shows that my method works on slot machines, too. One line spin on a penny slot, anyone?

DanJ

You don't even need to spend the penny. When I did it, all I did was create the player bank, upload $100 to the bank from my account, took the card to the cage and cashed out the bank for $100 cash in hand. You do have to make sure when you play the slots with the player bank, that you upload your money from the machine back to your card before leaving the machine (whether you actually play it or just use it to get fee-free cash). I have seen people simply pull their card out of the machine and walk away with 20 or 30 bucks left on the machine.

coach_tressel

On our last two CC cruises the money automatically uploaded to our bank when we pulled the card.

DanJ

SOunds like a nice improvement then. Been a couple years now since we've been on a Carnival line so I hadn't had the chance to notice. They probably had too many people walk away from the machine and lost money.

jkm1317

Agreed. It definitely works, just got off the boat a week ago and cash out a couple hundred before a port. Not a problem at all. I did however fall victim to a little gambling which countered the advantages. I would rather gamble the fee, get a few points than to pay an atm fee. Plus free points and use my Cap1 Venture miles to credit off the charge when I got back home.

mromero07

I went on Carnival this weekend and just did this 3 times for $100 each. There are only two problems that I encountered. One, the slot machines only let you load up to $100, so I did the max. I'm not sure if there is a way to load up more by doing it multiple times while the room card is inserted, but I really didn't try. Not sure if possible. The only other problem I encountered was that the first time I did it I didn't play at all. Just cashed it out. So I was told at the cashier that the next time I did this without gambling at all, my room card would deactivate this feature automatically and I would then have to use cash to play for the remainder of the cruise. So the second and third day I did it I found a penny machine, gambled a few pennies for less than a minute and cashed out and it worked just fine. I wanted to ring up about $2,000 worth of spending and ended up doing only $300 because I just didn't feel it was worth the hassle with the $100 per load limit, so if anyone knows of a way to do more than $100 per load by doing multiple loads by all means please let me know.

DanJ

The $100 thing might be their way of countering this now. I remember it was something $500 or $1000/day you were allowed to load into your player bank when I was last on Carnival in 2009. Indeed, I read reports on cruise critic of people bringing thousands of dollars home from the cruise by doing this simply for the points.

pseudoswede

As I said up-thread, if you are poker-inclined, then the Poker Pro tables allow you to charge up to $200.