Calnev1

Awesome. The $10 minimum bet means that the Sunshine has probably gone through a recent casino renovation. Thanks!

So there were three "casino wins it all" numbers on the Sunshine? 0, 00, and 000? I don't play Roulette, but that is TOTALLY customer unfriendly.

A lot of people feel that way about the machines. I know I do.

Thanks for the input. And yes the minimum bet on Fun 21 on both the Miracle and Panorama is now $1O. Out of curiosity, on your Sunshine sailing, had the $200,000 and $100,000 bets been installed at the table games?

I know what you mean about the dark MDR. But at least on the Miracle, you can get a table for two that is not right up against other tables for two. Sailing on the Panorama right now, and I sort of wish the MDR was darker so I could avoid looking at the folks jammed up against us.

Hello. I am an avid blackjack player, particularly of a variant called “Fun 21” which I have played across multiple Carnival ships. I have some questions about Fun 21 blackjack. (If you don’t play blackjack aboard Carnival ships, you might want to skip the rest of this post.) I got off the Miracle just two weeks ago, and I am aboard the Panorama right now. The casinos in both ships have been recently renovated. The renovations seem almost identical . . . but not quite identical. Specifically, on the Panorama all the card-based table games are now dealt from a machine (including Fun 21, which until recently had been dealt from a shoe). On the Miracle, however, Fun 21 is still being hand shuffled and dealt from a shoe. This seems strange to me, and in the case of the Panorama, disturbing. I don’t like card games dealt from a machine, and until recently I could rest assured that at least the Fun 21 game would be dealt from a shoe in every Carnival casino. Well, obviously not on the Panorama anymore . . . but still on the Miracle. So I am wondering, why wasn’t the renovation consistent as between the Panorama and the Miracle? And more importantly, what other Carnival ships with renovated casinos still deal Fun 21 from a shoe? If you are a blackjack player who has cruised in a Carnival ship recently and have noticed the new renovations, can you post the name of the ship and whether Fun 21 is still dealt from a shoe on that ship? You can easily tell if your ship has undergone these renovations. If renovated, all the card-based table games will now have a large digital sign advertising certain bets that pay “$200,000” and “$100,000” jackpots. Thanks for your input. Any info is greatly appreciated because in the future I will avoid the Panorama and any other Carnival ship that does not give me a shoe-dealt blackjack option.

And now the Carnival app will show you your accumulated points for both table games and slots. So my wife (who plays slots) and I (who plays table games) will track our points from cruise to cruise to correlate our play with future casino offers. If there is a correlation, which I believe there is.

I play Carnival blackjack a lot (mostly on the Miracle, Radiance, and Panorama) and every time someone has asked to use their SS card to buy chips at the table the dealer has informed the player of the 3% fee prior to the purchase. If your dealer hasn't been telling you about this fee your dealer hasn't been doing his/her job correctly. If I want to buy chips at the table I first load my slot account with money from my SS card, take two or three spins on the machine, go to the cage, and empty out my slot account in cash. I then walk to the BJ table and use that cash to buy chips. Carnival does not collect a fee if you use your SS card that way.

In thinking about the Kroger 4x, I realized that there could be another way to take advantage of that promotion. AARP sells many different grocery store gift cards at an 8% discount. Among these discounted GCs are grocery stores under both the Kroger umbrella and Albertsons umbrella. So when Kroger is running one of its 4x gift card sales, could you buy a discounted Kroger gift card at AARP and then use that Kroger gift card to buy Carnival Gift cards at Kroger? The math is pretty good. I think this could potentially produce a discount of up to 27%: 5% off from the VISA gift cards that you use to buy the 8% off Kroger GCs that you then use during the 14% Kroger 4x GC sale. (If you can get the 14% value from Kroger 4x sale…..). Likely, the fine print of the Kroger GC says you aren’t supposed to use that GC to buy other gift cards at Kroger. That is true with Albertson’s GCs (which I buy all the time from AARP). But one time I (accidently) tried to pay for a combined purchase of groceries and GCs at an Albertsons using Albertson’s GCs. And it worked! Then I tried it again later and it didn’t work -- they made me ring up the stuff separate. YMMV.

So when you buy the Carnival Gift Cards from raise.com at the 8% discount you buying a new gift card? If a new gift card, that would definitely be something I would consider. I presume you pay raise with a credit card. I wonder if you could use Visa Gift Card to pay for your raise transaction.

I know what you mean. My wife and I have separate AARP Rewards accounts. What I do now is alternate accounts from day to day. That is, on day 1, I buy gift cards on my account. On day 2, I buy them on her account. On day 3 I buy them on my account. (repeat, repeat). Since I have started doing this, no problem with my AARP gift card purchases going through.

I did the math in post #18 above, and agree that hypothetically you can get up to a 14% discount from the Kroger 4x. But there are a bunch of reasons why I don't think I could get close to the maximum discount. The biggest reason is that the price of gas at the Costco near me is generally eight to ten percent better than the starting price of gas at all the other gas stations around here, and so if Kroger partnered with one of those other stations the value of the Kroger deal would fall off sharply. Still some value though.

Fyi, I am quoting myself because I think the value of the Kroger 4x depends a lot on where you are and how much gas you can buy and use. So please don't flame me if you get much more value from the Kroger 4x where you are and in your personal circumstances.

I use VISA gift cards all the time to buy Carnival gift cards on AARP. The only catch is that you can't use multiple forms of payment for one gift card (e.g, you can't use multiple $200 Visa gift cards to buy a $500 Carnival Gift card). In practice, that means in a single transaction I will buy two $100 Carnival Gift Cards for $180 on AARP and then have $20 left on my $200 Visa Gift Card. I save up these partially used Visa Gift Cards and use them to pay down my USAA insurance bills online. USAA will let you use as many VISA gift cards as you want. You can also use them up on Amazon, although that is a bit more hassle. Having said all that, I am not sure that the Kroger 4x event is by itself a good way to buy VISA GCs. That is because VISA GCs have a purchase fee. For a $200 VISA GC, that fee would be $6.95 (or more), or about 3.5%. How much is Kroger 4x worth? Its not clear to me that it would be worth much more than 3.5%. You also could mitigate this fee by using a credit card that gives you a lot of points or cashback at grocery stores, such as the AMEX Blue Cash card which, as someone has noted, has 6% cash back at grocery stores. SO yes that would be worth it in combo with the Kroger 4x. Or you could buy these GCs when they are on sale with the purchase fee waived, which happens at various office supply stores and sometimes Lowes. I have a credit card that gives me 5% back at office supply stores, so I use that to get VISA GCs when the purchase fee is waived. And sometimes I can get 5% back at Lowes on another credit card I have.

And some people thought these offers are "drying up . . . ." Lol.

I have been using HAL egift cards for years now to pay for onboard expenses. I STRONGLY RECOMMEND you bring a hard copy print out of your egift card. The last three HAL cruises I was on the guest service folks wanted the hard copy when I went to put the card on my onboard account. I was very glad I had the hard copies. Another poster asked about using the GCs in the HAL casinos. It is simple. Put the gift card(s) on your onboard account. If you play slots, load your slot account by selecting "charge to room." If you play table games, tell the dealer you want to buy some chips and "charge it to your room." These charges will flow to your onboard account, and the gift card will be used to pay for the charges. If you don't blow all your charges in the casino, you get whatever is left over from the casino cage in cash.

Like you, my NCL offer showed up at the top of my offer list. I also think, like you, that AMEX prioritizes these offers and the big cruise line discounts get some sort of priority.

One of our local supermarkets occasionally puts gift cards on sale where they will give you 1000 rewards points for every $50 gift card you buy. The rewards points are worth one cent apiece in future grocery purchases. That works out to a 20% easy peasy discount on the gift cards! Unfortunately, the sale will only cover certain gift cards, not every gift card they sell and never Carnival gift cards. The last sale included Apple gift cards, so we got several of those.

This is interesting. Raise.com is a third party reseller of gift cards, which means that someone else had that gift card before you bought it and so has the gift card code and pin. Are you concerned that you might buy a gift card from raise that someone else might use before you do? That would concern me. But raise probably has protections in place against this,

OK, I can see that if you use 1000 fuel points and can max out your gas purchase by buying 35 gallons on one fill up you will potentially save $35. Since you get 2000 fuel points on a $500 Carnival gift card you can potentially fill up twice and save $70. Saving $70 on a $500 GC purchase is a discount of about 14%. So, potentially better than buying the same $500 Carnival GC on Allstate or AARP where you get a 10% discount. Still, for me the Kroger fuel points program would be a problem. I have a smallish car with a gas tank that holds only about 16 gallons. If you only buy 16 gallons of gas at a time the value of the gas points drops about in half, making the discount worth only about 7%. I guess if you have a pickup truck or RV you can always get 35 gallons every fill up. Or you can bring a gas can to the station or have a neighbor bring their car to get the full 35 gallons. But that is a hassle. I dug a bit deeper into the Kroger gas program on the internet and see there are further restrictions that could make it difficult to get full value. It appears you can only use the fuel points at Shell gas stations or Kroger gas stations. And at Shell gas stations you can’t use more than 100 Kroger fuel points each fill up for a max discount of only ten cents a gallon. Well, where I live there are gas stations (ARCO and Costco, for example) that always have gas that is at least ten cents cheaper per gallon than our local Shell stations, So Kroger points would be pretty much worthless at our local Shell stations. Which then leaves open the question: do Kroger gas stations that allow you to use the full 1000 points per fill up offer good starting gas prices compared to all the other gas stations in the area you live in? I think this could ultimately determine whether you actually get a good deal (e.g., at least a 10% discount when using the 4x Kroger points promotion). Some may wonder why I went through these machinations. My wife certainly did when I mentioned it to her. But it could come in useful, because we have other supermarkets where we live, like Albertsons, that offer similar fuel points programs. But I haven’t used any of those fuel points programs.

You can use Carnival Gift Cards on your cruise fare, port taxes and fees, and all your onboard expenses. Pretty much anything you pay Carnival for with cash or a credit card you can use a Carnival gift card instead.

Out of curiosity, how much is a Kroger gas point worth? I presume that 4x gas points means you would get 4 gas points per dollar spent, so that on a $100 Carnival gift card purchase you would earn 400 Kroger gas points. So if hypothetically a Kroger gas point was worth one penny, you would be getting about 4 dollars back in gas on your $100 Carnival gift card purchase. That would then be about a four percent discount on the Carnival GC purchase. But I am sure someone has actually figured this out.

Yup. Alaska cruises are cheap right now even without the casino offers. We do already have two Alaska cruises booked this summer on another line so don't think we will be adding a third Alaska cruise thru HAL. Airfares are high as you say. Another thing I don't like is that a lot of the Alaska cruises leave out of Vancouver. I find it irritating to fly into Vancouver, go through Canadian customs at the airport, and then have to go through US customs right before boarding the ship in Vancouver. I understand why they do it, but its just a hassle.

Uggh. just now tried to book the Zuiderdam Boston to QC and the HAL rep on the phone said the promotion was sold out for that cruise. Not sure what the takeaway is, other than book as quickly as possible. I do see on VTG and HAL's website that all cabin categories are still available at everyday rates, so it is a bit irritating that I did a bunch of preplanning and then was unable to get a cabin at casino rates less than 36 hours after receiving the initial email.