Credit or Debit Card on Royal Caribbean

Cash is King, but be safe a use a credit card...

If you set a cash account, but pay every so often with a debit card, there will be no holds. Just the payments.

We always put cash down on day 1 then when we are about 2 days from debarking, I go down and add my debit card. We have done this about the last 5 cruises. We have had zero problems. Debit cards are protected as I had mine compromised at Target about a year ago. I caught it early and the money that was taken was put back in my account about 5 days later.

Have a great cruise! :)

We always put cash down on day 1 then when we are about 2 days from debarking, I go down and add my debit card. We have done this about the last 5 cruises. We have had zero problems. Debit cards are protected as I had mine compromised at Target about a year ago. I caught it early and the money that was taken was put back in my account about 5 days later.

 

Have a great cruise! :)

Yes, debit cards have similar protections to credit cards but with an important distinction- with a debit card it's your actual money that is gone until the bank reverses the charges and they have 10 days to do this. So if your account balance is wiped out you have no money until it's fixed. At least with a credit card you have no real loss since the credit card company can't charge you anything until the problem is fixed.

If you set a cash account, but pay every so often with a debit card, there will be no holds. Just the payments.

On one cruise, I spent a bit more in the casino than usual. Since I didn't want that charged to my credit card, I went down to GS and requested they charge a specific dollar amount from my Seapass account to my debit card. Instead, they first put a hold on my debit for the ENTIRE amount of my account. Then, they also CHARGED the entire amount of my account to the debit card. Between the hold and the balance, it put that checking account into the negative, and took me more than two weeks to get it all resolved. From now on, if I want to pay down my Seapass account, I'll use cash.

Yes, debit cards have similar protections to credit cards but with an important distinction- with a debit card it's your actual money that is gone until the bank reverses the charges and they have 10 days to do this. So if your account balance is wiped out you have no money until it's fixed. At least with a credit card you have no real loss since the credit card company can't charge you anything until the problem is fixed.

Correct, and if one has significant automatic debits coming in that 10 day period, things could get uncomfortable.

What's been explained here before is that they run some sort of test charges daily, then run the total at the end of the cruise. Some financial institutions don't correlate the sum of the daily charges with the final charge, so the charges stay pending for a while, thus tying up a large sum. This process supposedly varies by financial institution, not the cruise line, and is why some report no problem, and others report holds that take days (if not weeks) to fall off.

This happened to me on board the Freedom with my credit union debit card. If you use your debit card, just make sure you have plenty of cushion (at least double what you plan to spend) in your account. I didn't like that so much of my money was "tied up" with Royal Caribbean for a couple of days after I had returned home. It took that long for the daily charges to fall off.

On my last 2 cruises I set it up as a cash account and went down to pay the balance with my debit card a couple of times. It just went through as a payment, no holds on anything.

This happened to me on board the Freedom with my credit union debit card. If you use your debit card, just make sure you have plenty of cushion (at least double what you plan to spend) in your account. I didn't like that so much of my money was "tied up" with Royal Caribbean for a couple of days after I had returned home. It took that long for the daily charges to fall off.

RCI has no control over the number of days the pre-authorization holds are in force. That is entirely up to your credit union.