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The four HAL casino offers I recieved this past year included a free stateroom, some funplay money, and drinks on us. I guess that would be your Category B mentioned above. I have never recieved a casino offer from HAL or any other cruise line that offered a free state room and did not at least include free drinks in the casino. So cant comment on any naked "free room" offers. Not sure why a casino would give even a naked free room offer to someone who has shown they dont gamble.

Yes.

If you are sailing a pinnacle class ship, the Club Orange includes a special small dining room and expanded menu for breakfast and dinner. In our experience on the Koningsdam, the service we recieved in the Club Orange dining room was the BEST we have ever recieved in our many cruises. We decided who needs specialty dining with this every day dining experience!!

The upgrade prices were not good at the time we booked our free cabin cruises. On one of those cruises -- on the Volendam sailing this Saturday, October 8 -- we recieved an upgrade offer just las week that was really good. But the roll call indicates many folks on this cruise are now receiving good upgrade offers, so dont think these upgrades are necessarily connected to the free cabin deal.

Not sure what your point is. If you spend nothing in the casino . . . you should not expect to get subsequent casino offers.

Lest there still be any doubt in your mind . .. IT IS A GOOD DEAL!!! 🙂

We have gotten three free room casino deals in the past 14 months. In our experience, the offers only come via email, there is no reference to any of them when you log in to your HAL online account. The offers include a 1.800 number for booking purposes. We have booked four cruises using these offers (two recently completed, and another two to be completed by the end of 2022) Prior to recieving these offers we had not sailed with HAL since 2017, and we were only one star mariners. We did use the casino on those earlier HAL cruises, but not to excess (that is subjective, I know). As someone else has pointed out here, don't expect to recieve these offers if you regularly book HAL cruises at close to retail price. HAL has no incentive to offer you these special deals!

Actually, AARP still has discounted Princess gift cards. But when you go to search you have to choose "redeem" and "all rewards" (NOT member rewards) to find the Princess (and HAL) gift cards. Still, as others have pointed out, the AARP gift card purchase function is not working on their website right now. Who knows when AARP will fix that.

Where does the 10% house edge figure come from? Is that percentage an educated guess based on your personal experience, or is it based on something that Princess or another cruise-related entity publishes? Just curious.

I am pretty sure the 20% discount on cruise cash was a one time IT error and not some sort of intentional cruise cash sale. In any event, I am only aware of this discount happening once. It occurred a few months ago. The discount was only available for a few hours and Carnival pulled it fast when folks started going wild with it.

Does Carnival always waive the single supplement on casino deals? And if you don't mind me asking, what was the most recent time you cruised single on a casino deal? Thanks.

I have never understood what the casino opening rules are. We are on the second leg of a HAL B2B up in Alaska now, and for the next four days the ship will never leave Alaska waters or be more than a couple of miles from land that belongs to the state of Alaska. Yet the casino will open between 30 and 45 minutes after departure from Juneau, Skagway, and Ketchikan.

I expect that I will arrive for embarkation in Barcelona without a medallion. Will Princess issue me a medallion at embarkation, even if they mailed one previously to my home address and I left for Europe before the medallion arrived? I apologize if this has been asked and answered before.

I will be on HAL next week for the first time in four years. So will try the Dive In Burger. I love Guy's burgers, but of course I hope you are right about the HAL burger!!

Thanks. I looked at a picture of the ore dock, and that ore slide looks like a pretty fun way to get off the ship . . . 🙂

Does anyone know where the Koningsdam docked? I believe it was scheduled to be in Skagway yesterday (Tuesday).

Thanks for this report. We are considering taking the train the opposite direction (Venice St Lucia to Trieste) in October to embark our HAL cruise. How was the train ride? Was it full? Seats comfortable? A place for luggage (realize you were on a day trip, but maybe you noticed . . . ). Any interesting views?

Looks like there is another cruise ship that will soon be homeporting in SF. And it cruises to . . . Stockton. https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/Bay-Area-river-cruise-costs-6000-17357489.php

Hope you enjoy your next cruise as well.

Ah, gratuitous SF bashing. I guess it was inevitable.

Yes, you did! I can see that you view the funpoint collection as a sort of forced savings toward a cruise. Not the way I think about credit card rewards, but I do understand your point of view. I was not aware of the Barclay's Rewards Boost shopping portal, but I also magnify my credit card returns by using different online shopping portals. I usually check with evreward.com to see what portal will give me the greatest return for a particular purchase. And to get back on topic, i am pretty much unconcerned about Carnival's cutbacks. The only one that affects me directly is the loss of the filet mignon at sea day brunch, but, heh, I am already over it. Someone pointed out that the various cutbacks can indirectly affect everyone through increased waits and lines, but I guess that remains to be seen.

I am having trouble understanding this. Its seems that you don't really want to cruise Carnival . . . .but you have the Carnival Mastercard and you collect funpoints on the Mastercard from purchases and you have to use those funpoints to book Carnival cruises. I think, though, that the Carnival Mastercard only gives you funpoints worth about 1% back on nonCarnival purchases, which you can then only redeem toward Carnival cruise fare. Have you thought about getting a no annual fee 2% cash back card (like the Citi Doublecash Card)? More money back . . . and you wouldn't be forced to use it to cruise Carnival!! Or if you wanted to cruise Carnival, you could just pay the fare with 2% cash and still have money in your pocket left over. What am I missing here? Perhaps I am missing something, because 300,000 funpoints for $4,500 in cruise fare looks like the equivalent of about 1.5% cash back when used for the cruise . . . but that is still not as good as a card that earns a clear 2% cash that you can use anywhere.

Ah, this is what I figured.

Well, we did get our bags despite our run-in with the handler! Actuallly, though, our trip to Australia was quite a few years ago and I don't remember anything particularly good or bad about the service in Australian restaurants. I know we have been to other places like France that I would say have a minimal tipping culture. Our experience with waiters in these places is that they do their jobs well, but they don't smile and banter the way many American waiters and waitresses do. I don't really need my servers to entertain me though.

Australia has a strong anti-tipping culture. The only time I have ever had a cash tip rejected in connection with a cruise was by a baggage handler when boarding a Princess cruise out of Australia from Sydney to Singapore. The handler was quite indignant when I offered him a few Australian dollars, and it made quite an impression on me.