Think about your points and miles as a supplement to reduce your cost on flights or hotels associated with a cruise.

There is no real means to use any of what you have to get a "free cruise". The cruiselines' own cards only earn you 1% rebate which would take mucho spending for you to even make a dent on your cruise fare, realistically.

As for the certificates - before you order up such, be sure to check all the T&Cs - whether you can use 10 x $100 certificates on a single cruise (they dont come in $1000, but $100 denomination.) And also whether they can be applied to ALL prices or must be certain category and up - prices vary a great deal from lowest category to just lower mid level category - And whether using the cert would preclude you from getting any agency discount and such (RCL does not have such, agent usually use OBC as substitute but CCL and all CCL owns lines do have agency incentives on select sailing - can make a good difference with or without.) There are quite a lot of fine prints in using these certs. Good luck in figuring them all out. Key is not get trapped with such certs you ordered, and wound up do not actually getting any saving when you have to pay a higher price in order to use those certs - so you actually wound up LOSING. No saving in cruise fares, but lost the pts as you redeemed it for the cruise instead of other things.

What you need is a good cruise agent, as well as monitoring some cruise discount sites (cruises-n-more comes to mind) and try to cruise at a close-in window. However if you have to go by school holidays, then forget about much discount because thousands and thousands of families are doing the same thing. In fact RCCL's ships could have 1/3 of the passengers are all school-aged kids... during school holidays. Whether this is your kind of cruise vacation, it is of course up to you.

If your kids are young enough, it pays to take them out of school for just a few days and cruise just at the edge on both ends of the school holidays - much cheaper prices and much calmer cruises. Or if your kids are good in self-disciplined, they would do their assignments even on vacation, then anytime of missing a few days of school is no big deal.