Happy

OT

For those who have not done a cruise before, ALL US-based ships, that means RCL owned and CCL owned lines and their ships, all have only ONE final statement for your shipboard account which would have EVERYTHING you ever charged to your shipboard card (you do now a cruise is "cash-less" onboard, I hope.).

Shipboard account is settled by credit card submitted at online check in, or at the check in counter. Passengers have the option to switch credit card(s) even while on board or switch to Cash (plenty of cruisers do that, obviously they are not among this crowd!).

So use whatever card you want to earn the miles / points as the card to be used to "guarantee" the payment of your shipboard account.

Each cruise line has its own policy on how to pre-authorize your credit card submitted at check in as a guarantee form of payment to settle your shipboard account.

CCL owns both Princess and Holland America, yet they operate very differently on this front:

Specifically to Princess as our experiences from 13 Princess cruises with the last one in the Fall of 2013. Unless Princess has changed its practice that I have no idea, but the mechanism works like the following:

Princess would authorize your card EVERY NIGHT for the ending balance of your shipboard account, NOT the incremental. This can pose some challenge for low credit limit cards because this is how Princess work:

Day 1, gratuity of $11.50 per person per day, $23. You run up a bar tab of $55.

Your account now has $78 outstanding balance.

Princess authorized $78.

Day 2, gratuity of $11.50 x 2. You did the casino advance of $500 (if you do not actually play, your account would be shut down from the privilege of advance after the first such usage so plan accordingly.). You bought something at the boutique for $50.

Your account now has $78 + $23 + $500 + 50 = $651 outstanding balance.

Princess then authorize $651 after midnight on Day 2, despite $78 already been authorized on Day 1.

Day 3, you have not done anything. Your outstanding balance now is $23 + $651 from previous day to equal to $674.

Princess then authorize $675 after midnight on Day 3, even though it has authorized $651 the day before.

Now on your card there are 3 authorizations - $78, $651 and $675 - reduced your available credit line by the SUM of these 3 amounts of $804.

So it goes on till the cruise finishes.

If you have a 7 days cruises, you would have 7 authorizations on your card, with the last one being the final total of your shipboard account at disembarkation settlement. However as you can see, each day Princess takes out an authorization that includes previous days balances, instead of just doing the incremental. Therefore it can quickly deplete the available limit on a low limit card.

For Holland America:

The line uses a FIXed amount per day for the WHOLE LENGTH of the cruise, and authorize that whole amount at Check In. The amount per day varies by length of the cruise, ranging from $70 to $90 per person if I remember it correctly.

So you would see ONE preauthorization on your card from HAL instead of the Multiple, and grossly OVER what is needed, preauthorizations from Princess.

If you have any existing shipboard credits, such as from the Future cruise deposits, Carnival shareholder benefits, travel agencies incentives, etc etc - they would all show up on your shipboard accounts. Pre-authorization would not start until the credit has been depleted by all shipboard charges including the daily gratuity.

Hope this help those who are new to cruise and plan to use Arrival card.

I dont see how anyone could have enough "miles" including the bonuses and MS, to pay for a cruise, let alone to pay the additional shipboard charges on top of the cruise purchased.

wroxpopuli

Thanks!

jan_believes

Thanks for sharing!

ashap

Mine code as CELEBRITY CRUISES - travel. Eligible for points redemption.

CrediPig

Why is it so hard to believe one could accumulate enough miles to cover a cruise... or several cruises?

ashap

+1 working now towards getting 2 cruises, each costing 5k+

Should meet the goal pretty quickly...

traveler525

We did have enough capital one points to pay for our Alaskan cruise on Princess (in a balcony stateroom) back in 2011 when capital one offered the match your miles promo. We did not put a lot of additional spend onboard so the onboard credit we received paid for that spend.

zipo

Not hard at all. I personally prefer to use it for airline miles, this way I get elite status, but if you use it as your main card, you can rack points up pretty quickly.

jan_believes

Wow, this card delivers!!!

Got mine in the mail last week. Same day as the demise of CC bought VRs at that drugstore.

Went to visit Simon, bought two GCs. Spent $1005.90. Wondered if the $1K min spend was a dream after seeing the present offers requiring $3K min spend.

Looked at my account online just now. The 40K have already posted!!! How cool is that, not having to wait for a statement to close!!! ^ And, not only that, but with the 40k came the 2k for the actual $1K spent.

I look forward to a year long happy relationship...

yOyOYoo

I just had a strange thing happen when trying to redeem for one cruise ticket.

Price of one 7 day cruise ticket was $573.41, I noticed when I went to redeem, it gave me an option of using 57,400 miles to pay for the trip. I redeemed, it said congratulations, and then I noticed it did not deduct any miles.

I tried this two times, and both times it said my purchase was complete... yet no miles were deducted from my account.

This glitch ever happen to anyone else??

bu08usc11

I know people like to cancel to avoid AFs but this card is way worth it. Why jeopardize not getting it again or your relationship with Barclays over a fee that you earn back in a week or two of MSing?

yOyOYoo

To update this, I sent a secure message to Barclaycard and they said I had to call in to make the redemption. Very strange. They processed the cash back for travel over the phone and say it should take effect in 24 hours.

This is the first time I could not make a redemption through the website.

stevebierfeldt

haha, yep! Joking aside that's actually a goal of mine. To get a 100% free cruise. It's a side project of mine along with some other ccard apps. To walk on and off the ship having spent exactly $0. We'll see though!

VERY helpful. Thanks a ton for such an in depth explanation.

Happy

CapOne had an up to $1100 sign up bonus on that offer if you had the 100K FF miles to match. We each had the card too.

This Arrival only has $400 sign up bonus, or with the 10% rebate, $440. That is less than 50% of the CapOne offer.

You would have to MS a TON to generate enough $ to cover a cruise.

Unless you are lucky enough to be on West Coast and have access to the no fee Pay Power and could buy as many as you want, chances are, the most gain you would get, NET of the cost of MS, is a 1.1% return.

For a $5K worth of cruise, totally paid by the card earnings NET of the MS cost, it would mean said person needs to MS roughly $455K. That is A LOT of MS Work to do to generate that amount. This is just basic MATH that anyone could plug it in a calculator to show it. Even a math-challenged person could do it if s/he understand how a percentage works - $450,000 x 0.011 = $4,950. Try it on your calculator and you would see how much MS required to generate that $5K after the MS cost.

If you can MS that much $ to pay for your travel - then hats off to you as you obviously have a lot of time to "invest" in this.

Now, if you are using a 5x card versus a 2x card - the story would be different because now the earning rate NET after the cost, on a 5x card would be 4% - that is 300% more than the Arrival card's 1.1% Net after cost. But we are talking Arrival here that is a 2x only.

So for a 5x card, after cost it really is a 4x - the same $5K only needs $125,000 MS to generate - that is A LOT LESS MS WORK TO DO, and many can manage this in several months time, not to mention there is no need to redeem the "mile" with a travel expense in order to get that 1.1% net return, as the 5x card is 100% cash rebate that you can use it on whatever and however you want to use it. That is why even with the $440 bonus, it is not the best card out there to generate your spending cash.

Personally I much rather to have the 30K US miles with $1 spend then the Arrival card if Barclays only let me have one card at a time. Multiple US cards work far better. Plan to have No.5 2 to 3 months from now, after getting the bonus on No.4 today. Virtually no work and the bonuses have much higher value in my book.

stupidzbu

I decided to challenge the "DIRECT MARKETING/DIRECT MARKETERS--NOT ELESWH" category of my GOL airline tickets.

I sent a SM, we'll see what happens