A free casino cruise offer covers the cabin only. Taxes, port fees and daily gratuities are normally still charged per person, along with flights, parking and anything bought onboard. Offers typically cover two guests in an inside cabin, restrict which sailings qualify, and carry an expiry date.
A casino offer lands in your email and it says free cruise. What it means is free cabin. Those are not the same sentence, and the difference is where people get caught.
This is not a reason to turn them down. I take these offers constantly and they are the best value in cruising. It is a reason to open the terms before you get excited, so the number at the end is the number you expected.
What the offer usually does not cover
| Taxes and port fees | Charged per person, and on a longer itinerary with several ports they are not trivial |
|---|---|
| Gratuities | Daily, per person, for the whole sailing. Our gratuities page has the published daily rates by line and cabin type. |
| Getting there | Flights, the hotel the night before, parking at the port. On a comped cruise this is often the largest single number. |
| Everything onboard | Drinks, Wi-Fi, specialty dining, excursions, the spa, photos |
| Travel insurance | Your cabin being free does not make your trip cancellation-proof. See the six-hour rule. |
The lines publish their casino certificate and promotion terms, and those documents are where the real answer lives for your specific offer. They are linked at the foot of this page. Read the one that belongs to your line, not a summary from someone on the internet — including mine.
Before you accept an offer, check these five things
- Who is covered. Many offers cover you and one guest. A third person in the cabin usually is not free.
- Which cabin grade. An inside cabin is the usual free unit. Upgrades are priced, sometimes steeply.
- Which sailings. Offers are often restricted to particular dates, ships or regions, and the good weeks get excluded first.
- What the deposit is, and whether it comes back.
- The expiry date. Write it on a calendar the day the offer arrives.
Mine is not overspending onboard. Mine is letting offers expire.
I get more free cruise offers than I can physically take. For the last couple of years I have been sailing two or three times a year on them, and I am trying to get that up to about six — not out of greed, but because watching a free cruise expire because the dates did not work is genuinely painful, and I have done it more times than I want to admit.
So how do you tell if an offer is a good one?
Do the arithmetic on the whole trip, not the cabin. Add taxes and port fees, gratuities for everyone in the cabin, your flights or your drive and parking, one night in a hotel if you need it, and whatever you realistically spend onboard. Then compare that total against what the same sailing would cost you booked normally.
Most of the time the offer still wins comfortably. Occasionally, on a cheap sailing out of a port you have to fly to, it does not — and it is worth knowing which one you are holding.
The bigger question underneath all this
A comped cruise is only free if you were going to gamble anyway. If you do not normally play, sitting down at a machine to earn a free cabin is a very expensive way to book a holiday, and the house is not confused about that.
Bring an amount you have decided in advance you can afford to lose completely, and stop when it is gone. A cruise you paid $1,000 in the casino for is not free — it is entertainment you enjoyed that came with a good side benefit, which is a perfectly fine thing to call it.
If gambling has stopped being fun, or you find yourself chasing losses, the National Problem Gambling Helpline is 1-800-MY-RESET (1-800-697-3738), with call, text and chat 24/7.
Questions I get asked
Are taxes and port fees really not included?
On most casino offers, no. Check your own offer's terms, because they vary by line and by promotion.
Can I put a third person in the cabin?
Usually yes, and usually not free. The offer will say.
Can I upgrade from the free inside cabin?
Often, for a price. Whether it is a good price depends entirely on the sailing.
Do gratuities get comped too?
Sometimes, on higher tiers. Do not assume it — look for it in writing.
What happens if I book and then cannot sail?
That depends on the offer's own terms and on whether you insured the trip. It is the question people ask after the fact, and the one to ask before.
How the offers are generated in the first place — and the experiment I ran on it — is in how the free cruise offers actually work. The published tier programmes are on our casino and comps page.
Where these facts come from
- Royal Caribbean, casino certificates terms
- Royal Caribbean, casino promotions terms
- Royal Caribbean, Club Royale rewards
- Celebrity Cruises, Blue Chip Club
- Princess Cruises, Sea You Soon
- National Council on Problem Gambling, helpline
Ports change their rules and their prices. Check the official pages above before you sail.
Independent tours usually cost less than the ship's, and are often run by the very same local operator. Look for a listing tagged Worry-Free Shore Excursion — Viator backs those with what it calls a "Back to Ship Guarantee," which is the bit that takes the worry out of booking on your own.
- Viator publishes 400,000+ travel experiences
- Full refund on most experiences cancelled at least 24 hours ahead
- Back to Ship Guarantee on Worry-Free listings
Affiliate link: we may earn a commission if you book, at no extra cost to you. How excursion booking works.
Search your comped sailing tours on ViatorStairs, gangways, tenders, long piers, a cane on bad days. All of that lives on our sister site, where it gets the room it deserves instead of a paragraph at the bottom of a page.
About the "I" on this page. AI Cruise Granny is the AI twin of Cruise Granny, a real human being who actually sails. Every experience written here in the first person is hers. The AI twin is what writes it up, checks the facts against official sources and keeps it current. We tell you that openly on every page, because you should know who is talking to you. More about how this works.