Carnival Sail & Sign Card?

[NMLady]

If you use fun ship dollars..they are not refundable or transferable to another cruse, and if you don't use all the money you loose it. The only way to get CASH on your account is to walk on-board with the actual cash and hand it over to the service desk. According to the Carnival rep I just spoke to, there is no way to pre-pay any CASH.

 

You are responding to a post that is almost two years old.

[Cruisin' Chick]

Your Sail and Sign card is your 'house key' on the ship. It opens your cabin door. All expenses are 'charged' to it, to be paid by your credit card or cash. But most important, whenever you leave the ship you scan it at the gangway and it clocks you off the ship. When you come back to the ship, you 'clock in' and the attendant looks at the picture that pops up on her screen and verifies that the card holder is really you. In this way, the ship staff know when someone has not returned to the ship. EM

 

This is a great description that applies to all of the mass market lines and maybe most of the cruiselines.

Ok, so I still need it then even if I am not going to charge anything? What if you don't charge a thing, they don't try and sneak charges on your card do they? My card is almost to it's limit (bad I know) and I'm a blonde who is terrible with money! All I know is I like to have it ha ha

 

If you read the first paragraph above, you'll see that there are more than one use for this card. I think I would be more concerned about credit card fraud elsewhere than on the ship. In fact, the only wrong charge on our account on any of our 11 cruises was when a bar accidentally overcharged our daughter for a soda, but it was immediately caught by the person plugging in the amount as we were able to tell on our folio, so that doesn't count at all.

 

If you are concerned about spending too much on board, there are ways to check on what you've spent each day. How would depend on your cruise line (you can certainly read up on Carnival or whatever your cruise line on its website -- and I do recommend doing that before any cruise; and you can ask on the line's board here on CC). Some will have a system that allows you to check your current charges on the in-cabin TV. Others would require you to go stand in line at the purser's desk. Princess now has kiosks by the passenger services desk that you can swipe each cabin card that is connected to your account (so for my family, I would have to check all three of our cards).

 

If you need to hold the line on spending, simply don't drink alcoholic beverages, go gambling in the casino, play bingo, buy art, buy stuff in the ship's stores, go on your own in the ports without buying excursions, don't buy ship's photographs, don't eat in the specialty restaurants. Some people follow this and still have a great time on a cruise. Or they might spend on what they like and not on anything else. The one thing I would never do is to reduce the auto-tips to the crew.

[Cruisin' Chick]

Gratuities are automatically charged to the card on the first day. You will need to put money on it one way or another. You can use a CC or cash but there is no option to not have it.

 

Depends on the cruise line. On Princess, the auto-tips are charged each night, rather than all on the first day.

 

Thanks for clearing this up for me as well. Have been worried about option of paying in cash (prefer to do this.) So, do I still need to have extra cash to be left in envelopes for tips at end of cruise or do they put it on this account?

 

Thanks!

 

 

 

Susan

 

These items depend on which cruise line. Some will give you a voucher (we haven't gone on one of these lines). On some, any extra money (above the autotips) can be given to crew members directly. So if you haven't been a jerk and removed the auto-tips, the extra tips can be kept by the crew member. If you did remove the tips, any cash you give has to be handed to the supervisor to be placed in the tipping pool. There may be other crew members who aren't in the tipping pool (such as kids' program staff) and you can ask for tipping envelopes to take care of them this way.

[Cruisin' Chick]

You are responding to a post that is almost two years old.

 

I saw that too, but figured just in case somebody was checking out this thread since it got bumped up by pulsipher2007, I would use this opportunity to amend some posts I saw with cruise-specific info which can be confusing.