Maximizing Free Cruise Offers

Introduction

In 2023 and 2024, I booked 93 days worth of cruises on Carnival using their “free” cruise offers. This post contains guidance on how to get the most out of their offers once you have one. Although it was written for Carnival, most logic will apply to other cruise lines.

An Example Offer

My Carnival Fun Match cruise was a similar 22 days, with a balcony, on Carnival Luminosa, from Brisbane to Seattle by way of New Caledonia, Fiji, Tahiti, Moorea and Honolulu.

First, let’s clarify what a free cruise offer includes.

In the case of Carnival, here is what you can expect.

• $200 deposit per cabin.
  Available as onboard credit.
• $120-$400 in port fees per person.
  Ports charge different fees.
• $16 per day per person mandatory gratuity.
  Some tip extra, but it’s usually a smaller amount.

For the offer pictured, cruising solo, we would pay the following.

• $200 deposit usable for anything aboard.
• $400 for port fees for 9 stops around the Pacific.
• $496 for gratuities across 31 days of sailing.

Food and basic drinks will be included, as well as premium drinks in the casino, but you will need to pay extra for wi-fi, excursions, premium drink packages or gambling. You can use your $200 in onboard credit to cover these, but there are also ways for you to indirectly cash it out (more on this later), so I won’t treat it as an expense going forward.

Maximizing the Cruise

Take Longer Cruises

Port fees vary, but you should expect to pay about $40-$50 per day in port including the first and last days of your voyage. Since long cruises contain more sea days than short ones, they have a considerably lower average daily cost.

Consider the following two 5-port itineraries, each with roughly ~$200 in port fees. The short cruise saves $96 overall, but its average daily cost is 50% higher.

Personally, I think the longer cruise is a much better deal.

• It doubles the duration for a 33% increase in price.
• Recovery sea days between destinations help maximize time in port.
• Sea days are also great if working remotely or to explore all a ship has to offer.

Book a One Way Passage

In the old days, people used to get on boats to go places, not merely sail around in circles. Round trips may be great for locals, but as a landlocked midwesterner, I love when a cruise takes me somewhere new instead of looping back to its starting port. After all, I was just in Miami, why would I want to go back?

My favorite options cross either the Atlantic or Pacific because I can easily extend the trip with an extra week or two abroad. Travelling this way, you won’t arrive jet-lagged, and you will experience some of the most interesting ports offered by any cruise line. Doing this has personally saved me thousands of dollars worth of airfare, per trip, on travel to and from Europe and Australia.

• Cruising for “Free” from Australia to Seattle
• Cruising for “Free” to Spain and Portugal

Those favoring a more domestic itinerary might want to check out a Panama Canal transit, which Carnival regularly offers between Seattle and New Orleans. Both cities are an excellent place to spend a few days on either end of a trip. Just know that transiting the canal is expensive and will add a big chunk to your port fees. It’s well worth it for the bucket list experience.

• Cruising for “Free” through the Panama Canal

Optimizing Your Onboard Experience

Choose Smaller Ships

The cruise ship industry is always advertising bigger and “better” ships, but often increasing passenger capacity comes at the expense of passenger experience. It’s hard to scale ship architecture and operations for all those extra people.

Let’s look at a comparison between 2,200 passenger Carnival Luminosa and the much larger 4,000 passenger Carnival Venezia.

Sometimes, the larger Venezia will have a feature that Luminosa lacks, like a waterslide, a burger joint, or slightly better hot tubs. But more often, you simply have more passengers competing for the same number of resources.

On Venezia, it was not unusual to see 5-10 minute waits at the buffet and 20 minute waits to get a few slices of pizza. Crew and passengers all seemed a little more stressed out. Meanwhile, on Luminosa, these lines were virtually non-existent and crew were happily customizing orders and conversing with passengers.

I believe these larger capacity ships tend to host more families, and that means more people, used to a whole house, jammed into a cabin half the size of a hotel room, often on their first cruise together. On Venezia, it was common to see couples at wits end arguing with each other or their children. This virtually never happened on the smaller Spirit class ships.

Book Adjoining Rooms

When using a free cruise offer, the cabin is free, and you only pay port fees and gratuities, both of which are charged per person. If you and your significant other both have cruise offers, getting two adjoining cabins is exactly the same price as getting one. True, you’ll need to pay a deposit for each cabin, but there are ways to get that back.

Booking separate cabins has several advantages:

• You get two bathrooms.
• One of you can work while the other naps.
• You can take a break from a snoring spouse.
• If you have kids, you can spread out a little more (but every cabin needs an adult).
• On Carnival, if one person in a cabin buys a drink package, all must, so two cabins provides more flexibility.

On my transpacific sailing, several experienced cruising couples were happily enjoying their own cabins.

Pick the Best Rooms in Each Category

On Carnival Spirit class ships, many deck four "inside" cabins have floor to ceiling windows.

Unless you’re a big spender, it’s not balcony offers all the time, but an inside cabin doesn’t mean you need to dwell in a dimly lit crawl space above the engine room.

On some Carnival ships, there are actually inside cabins with floor to ceiling windows, albeit with various degrees of obstruction. Often you will find these wherever the lifeboats are, and they are especially common on Deck 4 of Spirit class ships.

Your best bet to find an inside cabin with a window will be to:

• Search for reviews of your ship online.
• Check Carnivals deck plans, paying special attention to where the lifeboats are.
• Hunt and peck in the booking interface, which is tedious but will generally show if there is a window.

Paying for the Cruise and Extras

Book with a Premium Travel Card

You will usually want to book your cruise with a credit card that both provides good earning on travel and offers strong travel protections.

The Chase Sapphire Reserve earns 3x ultimate rewards on travel while providing the best travel insurance in the industry. Booking for two at 3x, and with a little luck, you may earn enough points to pay for an off-peak category 1 Hyatt for the night before your cruise.

It’s not unusual for Carnival to offer discounts via card linked offers so check your Chase and Amex cards before booking.

Chase Sapphire Reserve - Reviewed

• Best travel protections in the industry.

Buy Gift Cards

Many places sell gift cards for Carnival and other cruise lines at a steep discount, and you can use these to purchase extras like excursions, wi-fi or drink packages.

Always discounted:

• 10% off at AARP (requires membership, challenging website)
• 8% off at Raise (as Raise cash)

Newegg offers periodic stackable discounts.

• 10% off Carnival gift cards
• 3-5% cash back on card linked offers via Chase, Citi.
• Note: Although Newegg participates in shopping portals, they exclude gift cards.

Groceries often include cruise line gift cards in 4x fuel point promotions.

• Kroger
• Giant Eagle
• Others

In addition, you can find gift cards at places with excellent credit card multipliers.

• Gas stations
• Office supply stores

If you have a credit card that bonuses grocery, gas or office supplies, be sure to buy these in person as many companies use a third party to process gift card orders online and those code differently.

If searching for the best deals on gift cards, always check out Gift Card Galore, a gift card deal tracker maintained by Stephen Pepper of Frequent Miler fame. The site organizes merchants by tags so you can jump to all active and historic Carnival Deals.

Generally, while on a Carnival cruise, you can rack up a tab as long as you have a credit card on file. This will manifest as a pending charge on your card. Anytime before the end of the cruise, you can add gift cards to your account, at any Sign and Sail Kiosk, and those cards will immediately reduce the amount owed. So if you’re not sure how many gift cards to buy, you can just wait and buy them toward the end of the cruise, providing you have internet access. There is probably a limit to how large of a tab you can maintain.

Caveats:

• You can pay for the initial booking with gift cards, but then you’ll lose credit card travel protections.
• Companies can be weird about gift cards and change their policies without notice, so don’t go crazy.

Wi-Fi: To Buy or Not?

With the introduction of Starlink, Wi-Fi on cruise ships has improved drastically, but it’s still expensive. You can stream just about anything or participate in video conferencing meetings at the office. On Carnival, it will cost you around $20 per day which can nearly double the cost of some “free” cruises.

As someone that works part-time while travelling, I don’t have a choice, and so I’ve learned a few tricks to reduce the cost.

Carnival usually offers a 10-15% discount on Wi-Fi packages before sailing if you add an excursion or spa treatment. Some resort ports, like Princess Cays, sell $10 locker rentals as “excursions” and this can save you $20-30 on Wi-Fi over a 10-day cruise. Even better, if it is a water taxi port, simply having an excursion will get you priority debarkation.

If you’re on a shorter cruise, with a lot of ports, Wi-Fi on the boat isn’t likely to be of much use. Instead, I’d recommend getting a cellular provider with strong international support. I use Google Fi which has free coverage in over 200 countries. If you really need Wi-Fi while under sail, you can usually purchase a day pass. The in-cruise daily rate will be 10-15% higher than the pre-cruise list price.

Note that the internet is full of warnings to set your phone to airplane mode while sailing lest you rack up insane maritime roaming charges. I’ve never had a problem with this, but be careful if you’re in the habit of relying on your phone for connectivity in port.

Use Your Onboard Credit

When booking a Carnival offer, you will usually need to pay a $200 deposit. I’m fairly certain this can be used to pay for pre-cruise purchases and even installments if making multiple payments.

If for whatever reason you don’t spend it before your cruise starts, it will be available as onboard credit during the cruise.

Assuming you don’t want to spend it, you can effectively cash it out in the casino.

1. Go to any machine on the casino floor.
   video blackjack, video poker, slots, etc.
2. Enter your sign and sail card and select charge room.
   Your password is your birthday MMYY.
3. Specify $200 or however much you want to load.

After you’ve done this, you can probably play one or two hands and then cash it out by visiting any of the cash dispensers found at the entrances to the casino. I personally always play through any money I load at least 1x.

With Carnival, there is no fee for charging your room from a gaming machine. This is something fairly unique to Carnival, though some other lines offer this as a perk to those with status. Carnival will charge a 3% fee if you try to load money at the cashier or any table.

Conclusion

My favorite use for these offers will always be Carnival Journeys cruises which are longer voyages, usually one way, visiting unusual ports, often crossing oceans in smaller Spirit class ships sailing below maximum occupancy. They provide enormous value and only cost a little more than the standard overcrowded Bahamas loops.

You lose some amenities, but what you gain more than makes up for it. When was the last time you went down the water slide anyway?