Frequent Miler on the Air - Cruising for free | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep355 | 4-23-26

Episode Date: April 24, 2026

In today's episode, we'll talk about Amex Platinum shutting down paths for earning Delta airline fee credits, Google Hotels adding price drop alerts, and all the many paths that still exist for free cruises in 2026.Main Event: Cruising for freeGiant Mailbag(01:07) - Greg gets corrected about Bilt point accelerator vs Rent Day...Crazy Thing: Capital One Shopping(03:27) - Capital One brings Gmail to a crawlRead more about the unfortunate Capital One slow gmail issue hereBonvoyed: Amex Airline Fee Reimbursements(08:48) - Delta tricks are deadRead our resource for Amex airline fee credits and what still worksAwards, Points, and More(13:15) - Google Hotels adds price tracking(17:02) - Melio (pay bills with credit card)Learn more about Melio here(19:01) - Chase Travel℠ Points Boost increased to 2.5cpp for a few select propertiesRead more about Chase Travel℠ Points Boost increase here(21:21) - Guide to booking Preferred Hotels with points (Updated)Find our updated resource for booking Preferred Hotels online here(25:24) - Tools for finding point-bookable events (auctions and buy it now)Visit the discover tools Pointsevents.com and Pointauctions.comMain Event: Cruising for free(29:33) - Learn more about cruising for free in 2026 here(30:44) - There are three main options for free cruises in 2026(31:08) - Land-based casino loyalty programs & matches(36:26) - Why do casino elite statuses matter for free cruises?(49:00) - Cruise line direct match opportunities for “free” cruises(1:07:09) - Gambling on board might yield a free cruiseSubscribe and FollowVisit https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don’t forget to like and follow us on social media.Music Credit – “Ocean Deep” by Annie YoderMentioned in this episode:Visit FrequentMiler.com Did you know that Frequent Miller is also a website? At frequentMiller.com, you'll find all the latest deals, news about points, miles, and rewarding credit cards, the single best, Best Credit Cards page on the web, guides to all popular rewards programs, and many other terrific resources. If you'd like to get our posts sent to your email, go to frequentMiller.com/subscribe and sign up for free. https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/Check out all of our other travel podcasts from around the worldThis podcast is part of Voyascape, a podcast network that brings together the world's best travel podcasts. You can find all of our podcasts from around the world at Voyascape.com. If you are interested in advertising or sponsored content on any of our shows you can find out more at the link below.Voyascape Podcast Network

This is a Voyescape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world at voyscape.com. On today's episode, the Amex Platinum shuts down paths for earning Delta airline fee credits. Google Hotels has added price drop alerts. And there are still many paths available to free cruises in 2026. Today's Miler on the Air starts now. event cruising for free in the last few years the opportunities for getting free cruises through tricks we've published here have dwindled a bit but there are still

several opportunities available Nick has updated his post on how to do that and today on today's episode we're gonna go over all the different ways that you can in 2026 still cruise for free that's right and if you'd like to jump ahead to that or you want to back to it later on. Don't forget, you can always find the timestamps in the show notes. Just expand the description box. And wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to like this video or podcast, leave us some stars or review. Your comments are always appreciated. Thank you very much for that. Now we've got to drag out this week's giant mailback. In today's giant mail, several people reached out to tell me I was wrong. On a recent Ask Us

Anything, I was talking about how I used my built card. And I was saying that I use the point accelerator. So I redeem built cash so that I get an extra point per dollar on up to $5,000 spend. And separately, I take advantage of the rent day doubling, where you get up to 1,000 bonus points for all spend that's doubled. And in the Ask Usk Us Anything, like I said, I was aware that the two bonuses don't stack together at once, which is true. But what I said about how I deal with that was unnecessary. So I was saying that I always make sure to finish off my $5,000 spend before rent day so that my rent day spend doesn't mess up with my ability to earn an extra point per dollar

for all my other spend. And it turns out that that's totally unnecessary. Several people reached out to say, hey, yeah, it's true. they don't stack together at once, but the spend you put on rent day that gets doubled doesn't count against the $5,000 of spending for your point accelerator. So, you know, it's just a clarification, but for those with built cards, especially the built palladium where, you know, you earn a default 2x everywhere and can up it to 3x everywhere with those point accelerators, it's simpler than I thought to take advantage of both of those

types of bonuses. Well, and it's interesting because you'll still earn built cash, right? So you actually will earn a little bit more than the $200 worth of built cash in between accelerators if you follow the math on that, right? Because if you're doing rent day spent. Sure. Anyway, so it's kind of interesting. But yeah, good to know. Important to know. And important for me, there's some couple things I put on the card on the first of every month. And so I'm glad to know I hadn't actually looked at how it worked myself. I wasn't here for that. Ask us anything. So I, otherwise I would maybe check my point earnings, but good to know that we got that correct now. So thank you very

much to the readers who helped us out. Now, let's talk about what crazy thing? What crazy thing did Capital One shopping do this week? Yeah, we talk a lot about Capital One shopping and how great it is because it delivers to your email, all these like incredible offers, like, you know, get 30% back at Hertz and, you know, 25% percent. percent back at this and that and the other and sometimes much higher rates even and the way it works though the way you get those offers is you install the Capital One Toolbar in your browser and when you're shopping when you're browsing websites even not shopping like let's say you're looking you're on the iHG website all of a sudden you'll get offers for bookings at iHG and the so that's all great

except that Stephen Pepper found that there's a big downside to installing this extension. Yeah, you know, it's interesting because I've read his post, and I haven't had the same problem, but he found plenty of other people apparently on the internet who have, where the browser in which he has the Capital One Shopping extension installed was slowing Gmail down considerably to the point where it was taking just too long for him to put emails into different folders or snooze them or find them if you wanted to search for them. And I could see how that would be really annoying. And when he Googled it, he found some results from Reddit discussions where people said

disabling the Capital One Shopping Extension fixed that problem. Have you noticed a problem with this, Greg? Yeah, it's funny. When Stephen first told us about this, I said, no, it hasn't happened to me. but then as I was just doing my daily stuff, I noticed Gmail, it does seem kind of slow. So I disabled the toolbar, and sure enough, it sped right up. So I did a little experiment where one particular email

was taking several seconds to open. And I did it several times before uninstalling a toolbar, just to make sure it was replicable. Then I disabled the toolbar, and boom, the email just popped right open instantly. So yeah, I'm going to start, you know, I used to do all my shopping in a separate browser instance and I'm going to move back to that and just keep the Capital One shopping toolbar there. It means changing my habits a little bit and it also means when I get an offer, you know, an email offer from Capital One shopping.

Instead of just clicking it to open it, I'll right-click to copy the URL and bring it to my shopping browser pasted in there to activate the offer. Yeah, you know, that's, so it's interesting to me for a few reasons, number one, because I haven't ever noticed this, but number two, probably, maybe the reason I haven't noticed this is because I do exactly what you just said. The browser where I have the extension installed, now you mentioned toolbar a couple of times. Do you mean toolbar or do you mean extension? I've been an extension. That's what I thought. Okay. I didn't know if there was a toolbar because I don't have a Capital One toolbar. But the browser where I have the extension installed, I'm not usually messing around with my

email apart from looking for an email from Capital One shopping. It's an entirely different profile. In Chrome, you can set different profiles. So if you're logged in and you're using Chrome, if you click on the little icon in the top right that's maybe your picture or your first initial, then under that there is an option to add Chrome profile. So I have one specific profile where I have the Capital One Shopping extension installed, which is exactly what Greg was just describing. So I'm not usually going through my email except to look specifically search for an email from Capital One shopping.

Otherwise I'm not touching my email at all in that browser. So maybe I just haven't noticed this because I'm not, That's not my primary. I have a different browser instance with the same Google Chrome, like not the same profile, but same email address logged in. So I check that email in a different browser entirely when I just need email access. So yeah, that seems to be probably the right way to play this if multiple people are finding it slows Gmail down.

That's weird that it slows Gmail down like that, though. Right, right. And as you're saying that, I realized in my shopping instance, I could just have Gmail set up in there and only use it for opening those those capital one shopping emails and you know just deal with it being a little slow for that it'd be fine um it's not the end of the world type of slowness but it is it is noticeable um now that i have seen the difference it's interesting because i'm clicking around in that browser right now and i haven't noticed it yet but i'm sure maybe i would so a good good tip a great tip from step step from step and a good reminder that capital one shopping sometimes has these

It's just incredible. I use it all the time for these incredible offers. I just constantly find myself using it. And I know some readers have had lots of problems with Capital One shopping, so that's worth mentioning that some readers constantly report issues with it. But I've had tons of success. So I continue using it. All right, let's talk next about being Bonvoid. Unfortunately, this week, we've been Bonvoyed by American Express. Yeah, yeah. It's one of those things where they have every right to do this. You know, it's not like they're doing something devious, but it's a shame. So American Express Platinum cards, you know, have $200 of airline incidental fee credits

that you're allowed to, you get a rebate on every year based on the airline that you selected. So, you know, I always, in the past, have picked Delta as my preferred airline. and then whenever I charged incidental fees to the card, they'd be automatically rebated up to a total of $200 back per year. I used to do tricks. So there are things that are specifically allowed, like seat assignment fees, like lounge access fees, check bag fees, things like that. but most other stuff is not allowed, but some of the other stuff worked.

And so, for example, what has consistently worked for a long time is buying airfare, but paying for part of it with either a Delta credit card or Delta flight credit or even using their pay-with-miles thing. Like as long as the flight, you know, price was partially paid for with one of those other types of credits. And as long as what you put on your credit card was less than $250, it would be treated like an airline incidental fee and you'd get your $200 back. Similarly, award taxes also got rebated in the same way. So for years, I've found it very, very easy to get back the $200 per platinum card, no problem at all. But it seems as if that all of the Delta options like that are now dead, that Amex has figured out how to weed out those types of spend from, you know, real fees. And so, yeah, now I'm going to have to prefer another airline start.

next year. For me, I luckily had already used up all my credits across my platinum cards, but if you haven't, and you've already selected Delta, it's worth checking with Amex, whether you can switch to another airline where more of those tricks still work. Yeah, you know, technically you're only supposed to be able to change airlines once per year in January or something, but in practice, I've never had a chat agent tell me that I can't switch even after having used some of the credit. So if you're in that situation, it's worth at least asking and trying. This one makes me nervous because they recently came for United Travel Bank and now the easy ways to use the credits via Delta. Southwest has long been the other airline

that I have used heavily. I haven't actually used Delta, but United and Southwest have been the ones I've used heavily. So I need to now make sure that I have used all of this year's airline fee credits. In fact, I know I haven't used the card I opened most recently yet. So I'm going to make sure I use those with Southwest soon because it feels like AMX is coming for all of the unintended ways that this has worked in the past. Yeah, you know, I know so many people were hit hard when they stopped crediting for United Travel Bank purchases.

And now with Delta, basically dead for this, it does seem like they're going to go after, probably they're systematically going after the ones that were being used the most, I'm guessing. Right, right. Right. That's my guess, too. I would assume that that was the way it was.

But especially as those get trimmed, then the pool for Southwest is going to increase. So time to use those. Anyway, use them. Yeah, anyway, we have a post about these airline fee credits and what still works. And we will do our best to keep that up to date. So we'll have a link to that in the show notes. So you can see what other options you have if you've been hoping to use Delta credits. Very good. All right. Now we're going to talk about awards points and more. First up for awards points and more this week is a development I'm really excited about. So Google Hotels has added price tracking at the hotel level. I don't know. Am I the only one? Are you excited about this, Craig? What do you think? I'm happy about it. It's not to me like a super exciting development, but, but I mean, it's a great addition. I think this is going to save people tons of money and points because the ability to track the price of a hotel. First of all, I

ever book an advanced purchase rate. I always want to have the flexibility. So I'm almost always booking a rate that I can cancel later in change. However, am I searching that hotel every single day over the course of months at a time? No, I'm not. So maybe I'll catch a lower rate for that hotel. Maybe I won't. It's something I think of from time and time and I have to think to search for. Now I could just set it and forget it. And I almost guarantee you that almost every reservation probably drops in price at some point. I mean, it depends on when you book and all that, I suppose. But I bet you I have a lot of reservations where the price will eventually change.

And so I think this is going to probably save me a bunch of money without having to obsessively search. And that's one of the things I've loved about hotel award or rather flight award alerts, is that it has reduced the amount of time I need to waste obsessively searching for something when I can let the automated tool do it for me. So I think that's a great ad for that use case. but then also with more and more hotel programs becoming dynamically priced, I think the value in adding price tracking is that when you see the price has dropped significantly, there's a good chance the point price might have dropped also,

especially if it's a Marriott or a Hilton or an IHG, or maybe when Hyatt soon introduces these multiple different levels of pricing, maybe it'll even indicate that a Hyatt property has decreased in category within the category, so to speak. So I think that this is likely to say, save me both points and money all the time. I just need to remember to set it up. And, you know, but if you do that, if you take the couple of minutes, it takes, and you get the automated email. I've been doing this with flights now just the last couple of months. I know you've been doing it

for much longer with flights, but I get emails all the time about the price changes on flights, both up and down because I just keep them going, even though I've rebooked already. And so I see how often those prices change. I think this is going to be a really valuable tool to have. Yeah, no, I mean, it's a great addition. I do want to remind you that for points bookings, a lot of hotel award search tools have alerting capabilities that could let you know when the price goes down. Now, it's a little more, it's usually, it depends on which tool you're talking about,

but usually a little more involved because you need to go in and create an alert for the price that you paid, and then it'll tell you when it went down from there. So this is a little more dynamic. than some. I believe that, oh, boy, I need to double check this. I think Gondola will, if you let it have access to your loyalty program information, I think it'll watch the point price of the hotels automatically,

but I'm not sure about that. We'll have to get back to that later. That may be the case, but I'm not going to allow Gondola access to my loyalty program. So that one's out for me. The hotel alerts is a really good point, though I think, I could be wrong about this, But I think most of the different hotel search tools limit you to a certain number of alerts, right? So I think either at a time or period or whatever the case may be. Yeah. I'm not sure that run-studdero has a limit, but I don't know.

There you go for sure. So maybe that's one I ought to use. That's a good point. And I think maybe something that's probably worth writing about separately. So I'll have to look into that. All right. So that's Google Hotels adding price tracking. I think that's awesome.

Next up, we've got a change with Melio. And this is also a positive change. Yeah, yeah. So for for quite a while, Millio is a service that lets you pay your, your businesses' bills with a credit card, even from recipients who don't take credit cards because it, Melio processes the credit card, charges you a 2.9% fee, I think it is, and we'll send, you know, either an ACH deposit or a check to the recipient. For a long time, we had a special exclusive offer with Melio. where people who signed up through us were able to get a $200 bonus on their first payment of $500 or more. And that changed recently that Emilio opened up the $200 offer to most publishers. So we went back to Melio and said, how about something even better for our readers and listeners? And they've now upped the bonus to $230. Now, I know that's not a huge difference, but at least it's something extra.

And what's very important to know is that this only works if you haven't signed up for Melio before. So make sure if, you know, don't do this unless you're a new user. And then go to our post about Melio. Click through the link you'll find there. You'll also find all the details about the promotion there. And then you should be eligible for the two. $230 just for making a payment of $500 or more.

To find that post, go to frequentmiler.com forward slash milio. That's M-E-L-I-O. Yeah, and you want to make sure you check that out because if you don't go through our link, it probably goes without saying. But if you don't go through our link, you're not going to necessarily get that $230. You know, so you got to make sure you go through our link if that's what you're looking for. All right. Let's move on to next up here.

Chase Travel has boosted points boost in a few cases. cases anyway. Chase travel points boosts has increased to two and a half cents per point, but it's just for a few select properties, right? Yeah, there are, I think, 11 total properties where they've said that they're going to be making your points worth two and a half cents per point towards those properties. I mean, that's a great deal. But keep in mind that sometimes Chase's prices are higher than you'll find elsewhere. So you might not be really getting too 0.5 cents per point value compared to what prices you might get elsewhere. However, chances are good. It still would be really good, like maybe two cents or two point something cents per point value.

I'm just going to call out there are four properties in the U.S. that I noticed and then seven more around the world. So I'm going to just mention the four that are in the U.S. to keep things brief. There's the Four Seasons Resort, Rancho and Contado in Santa Fe, New Mexico. There's the Grand Hyatt, Deer Valley in Park City, Utah, the Ritz Carlton, Portland, and the Surrey in New York City. So if you're interested in any of those, that might be a great opportunity if you have the Sapphire Reserve Card. And also check out our post, which we'll have a link to in the show notes, to see the other seven hotels around the world that are available.

Yeah, and if you're looking for a stay of more nights, keep in mind that a lot of these properties are likely to also be found via Amygook. find hotels and resorts. So maybe if you've got more than one card that has one of these luxury booking benefits, you may be able to book a night or two with FHR and book a couple of nights with Chase and be able to enjoy a longer stay. But yeah, I think it's interesting to see this. I think it was a little bit of a niche thing with like 11 properties in the entire world boosted. It's kind of like, that's a limited utility overall. Although I will say I did book several nights at the Grand Hyatt Deer Valley already with FHR credits at the end of last.

year because I did find some really good cash rates during summer months. So obviously that's like more of a ski destination. So you may be more interested in that during the winter. But we decided we'd check it out during the summertime. So there you have that. Next up in the awards points and more here. We've got the guide to booking preferred hotels with points. It's been updated. So you made an update to kind of consolidate and make things useful and update the transfer ratios, correct? Yeah. So until very recently. So there are two major ways to book preferred hotels and resorts with points. One is to use preferred hotels' own I prefer points, and the other is to use choice privileges points. And across preferred hotels' entire list of hotels that they have, not all of them can be booked with any points.

some of them can be booked with choice points or I prefer points. Some can only be booked with choice points. Some can only be booked with I prefer points. And you would think that there would be more that could be booked with I prefer than choice, but that's not necessarily the case at all. Anyway, until very recently, having City thank you points was the best way to book preferred hotels because City used to transfer one to four to I prefer and one to two to choice. And neither of those things are the case anymore.

City now transfers one to two to I prefer. So that dropped in half, how many points you get out of a city from that. And it dropped one city point to one and a half choice point. So that dropped not as drastically, but it still dropped on that side. So what I did is I took out. The post used to be pretty much dedicated to Citibank. And I took out the city stuff, and, well, I didn't take it out, but I broadened it to include other transferable points that can be used to book preferred hotels. So that includes Capital One, which transfers one to two to I prefer, which is the same as city.

And Wells Fargo, which transfers one to two to choice, which is now better than city. and I've updated the map and searchable table so that now you can see in the table, in the table, in the map, like, what is the point value you'd be getting using Wells Fargo points, for example, or Capital One points or City points, and it's all adjusted to the new ratios, if you're looking at City. So it was a lot of work, but that is now live and ready to go. there are still really good values to be had, just not as many as before, unfortunately, because of the loss of that one-to-four transfer from city.

Yeah, you know, it's interesting that loss came into play. And I scrambled because there was a preferred hotel that I was interested in booking, but in the case that I was facing, that particular preferred hotel was only bookable via choice. So, which was fine. It was still a good value via choice. And I did transfer, even though you can buy choice points on sale. I did transfer for that particular booking. But anyway, it's worth checking this out and looking because I find this, first of all,

I find the map much easier way to look and find places. And then second of all, I love that it's pretty easy to see, which can be booked with which type of points and which offers more value in general. So really helpful. It's a great tool for looking for this. Otherwise, I find kind of like hunting and packing to try to find I prefer hotels is kind of annoying just from a like a high level view, so to speak, even more annoying once you start using the I prefer a website because it kind of stinks. And it's hard to find places, hard to find where

they are, hard to figure out which ones are going to be bookable with points. And then if you filter to what's bookable with points, then you may be missing hotels that are bookable via choice. And so it's just a frustrating experience. So this post is definitely your friend if you're still interested in booking preferred hotels. All right. Finally, on Awards points and more. We've got tools for finding point bookable events. So what I'm talking about when I say point bookable events is that many different programs have auctions or experiences that you can buy or bid on with points. So, you know, talking things like nowadays, tickets to the upcoming World Cup events, but also sometimes concerts or meet and greets or sports opportunities or dining

opportunities or in the past Stephen's written about, I think being able to book the seaplane transfer to a particular hotel in the Maldives using your hotel points, et cetera. And the problem with these is that there's so many of them out there. Almost every airline and hotel program has some version of this. And so it's really time consuming. And I say that from experience because in recent months, every couple of weeks, I've been logging into one after another just to look and see if there's anything new and interesting. And it takes me like an hour or more just to go through the different sites to log into all of them. a reader brought up the fact that there was a site called pointsevents.com that collates a bunch of

these events. And then when we wrote about it, another reader commented that there's another similar site called point auctions.com. And so I haven't actually used point auctions.com yet. I used points events and wrote about it the other day. And I was just really impressed at how well everything was collated. They didn't waste a lot of time and effort on visuals. They made it a tool that works pretty quickly and allows you to look at a wide range of stuff and see as much or as little detail kind of as you want and filter with a bunch of different filter options. I just found it, A, awesome because it's a huge time savings if you've got a lot of points and you're just curious what you can be booked.

And B, it was a great discovery tool. There were some really cool experiences with a core that I never would have seen. I didn't even ever think about logging into a core looking for auctions with their points. And I saw some things like playing soccer where, you know, one of the professional teams in Paris plays and getting a chance to play a tournament on the field, which I mean, how awesome would that be if you were a teenage kid that was into soccer or an opportunity to play tennis where they play the French Open and to be able to play on the clay court with a former professional, et cetera. So things like that that I just didn't even know we're out there and lots of other stuff. So I don't know if you've checked these out, but I think these are really useful. I've looked briefly, and I'm so relieved. I was actually just a few weeks ago. I was complaining that I didn't have any good way to search this. For me, it's not so much that I look for what's new and interesting. It's more that I know I'm going to London or Paris or something, and I want to see if there's any good points things that I can be doing. Because often they have really interesting culinary events. I know, I know Stephen and his wife did a, I think it was a New Year's Eve thing. in New York City.

And so anyway, so like I just want to see it. Is there anything good like that that I could do while I'm in that city? And not only without these tools, not only do you have to go one by one to all the different sites to try to figure that out, but some of them are so bad and they won't even let you filter by a particular city. So then you've got to, I don't know. It's just, it's so good to have one, or in this case, two places to go to, to, to, look across all these programs. So that's a really good development. Yeah. And I think that because

there's so many people in the United States that have a lot of points, it could be easy to forget that the points game isn't quite as developed in a lot of other places. So I think sometimes there's some opportunities to get some awesome experiences, particularly abroad because there just may be fewer people you're competing with in order to bid on those experiences. And so you looked at it as what's going on in the places I'm going to. I look at it as a, well, what might I plan a trip around. Is there something really interesting and cool that we can plan a trip around? So, so you could certainly look at that in different, different ways. But I think it's useful. It's great to have those out there. So that's awesome. All right. We'll be right back after this with our main event.

We hope you're enjoying the Frequent Miler on the air podcast. Did you know that Frequent Miler is also a website? At frequentmiler.com, you'll find all the latest deals, news about points, miles, and rewarding credit cards, the single best best credit cards page on the web guides to all popular rewards programs and many other terrific resources. If you'd like to get our post sent to your email, go to frequentmiler.com forward slash subscribe and sign up for free.

And we're back with today's main event, cruising for free. Nick, you've figured out what opportunities for cruising for free are still available in 26. I know it's not as many as in 2021 when you first started writing about this stuff. But it seems like there's still quite a few things that can be done. There are still quite a few things that can be done.

And I want to insert the air quotes around the word free that you mentioned when you said cruising for free because free sounds free, but with cruising it's not usually free. So free means no cruise fare in most cases. But in many cases, you'll still have to pay port taxes or potentially other fees. We'll talk more about that. So it's not quite free, but oftentimes really deeply discounted. And I'm not talking about just like finding a good cruise agent discounted.

I'm talking like thousands and thousands off of potentially some of these cruises. So we'll get into that. If you've done any of this before and you've kind of fallen behind, you're not necessarily left out. And so we'll talk about how you might be able to get yourself back in. But there are three main ways that you can get free cruises, basically. So the three main options for this that we'll talk about today are, land-based casino loyalty programs and matches, cruise line direct matching opportunities for free cruises, and gambling on board. And that third one probably seems obvious, but the reason that I'll mention

it briefly anyway is that it might require less gambling than what you imagine, or there might be ways to mitigate how much you may lose if you, if you are interested in that method. So let's start off the land-based matches. So for most of the land-based matches, it's going to be helpful to have either Caesar's diamond or MGM gold status. Now, Caesar's diamond status used to be easy because you used to be able to match from Wyndham Diamond to Caesar's diamond. And actually, you still can, but not if your Wyndham Diamond Diamond status comes from the Wyndham earner business credit card. Then you can no longer match to Caesars. If you have Wyndham status just from staying at Wyndham Properties enough, then you can match that to Caesar's diamond. So if you're just a Wyndham fanatic and you have diamond status

based on your stay activity, then you can match that to Caesar's diamond and get started on this quest to match around. If not, you could get the Caesar's prestige credit card. So the Caesar's prestige visa signature card offers big spending bonuses. Now, it's not necessarily going to be worth it for everybody to do that because you're giving up some value, quite a bit of value, potentially, depending on how much you value the reward credits that you earn on that card. But the card offers the opportunity to earn tier credits was spent. And so the shortest version of the story is if you spent $50,000 on the card, you would have more than enough tier credits for diamond status. You'd be pretty close to the next level up. Or you could just reduce your path to diamond status. If you

got the card and you spent $10,000 on the card in your first calendar year, you would end up having 7,500 tier credits about halfway to diamond status. For some reason, I got extra tier credits. So I actually ended up with 10,000 tier credits. I don't know why. I don't know if that's replicable or not. But anyway, you could significantly reduce your path to diamond. And when I get to the gambling later on, we can talk about how you might bridge the rest of that gap. Although I will mention briefly here that if you're a gambler at all, Caesars runs some 5x and 10x tier credit days, days where you can earn additional tier credits for gambling. You tend to earn more tier credits for machines than you do for table games. And some machines offer the opportunity to play strategically

and have a relatively low house edge. And so it's possible to gamble through one of those machines that has a relatively low house edge to somewhat mitigate your risk anyway in terms of your losses. And if you're doing that on a 10x tier credit day, then you can earn diamond status or bridge the gap with much less in gambling than what you may otherwise need. Traveling well for last is a blog. YouTube channel that covers a lot of that. And she actually has, Deborah has a list on her site, a downloadable list of all of the 5x and 10x tier credit days at all of the Seizers properties around the country that are coming up in 2026. So if that path appeals to you, that's a resource that I would recommend for that purpose. But to just back up a little bit. So it sounds like

if you are willing to spend $50,000 on that season. Caesar's prestige card, you're done, right, as far as getting Caesar's diamond. That's all you have to do. That's Caesar's diamond. That's it. You are presenting a bunch of alternative ways that didn't require $50,000 of spend. $50,000. Yeah.

Okay. Correct. Correct. So you could spend $10,000 and then do some gambling to bridge the gap. Or you could just do the gambling entirely on those 10x days. There are plenty of people that are in diamond status in a day during those 10x tier credit events because of the way that works out. Yeah.

So that's another on-ramp potentially. And when we talk about gambling, I will talk about that in a little bit more detail. I'm not going to get deeply into it because this isn't a gambling show per se, but I'll give you at least the basics there. The other option is getting MGM gold somehow. Now, two main ways to get MGM gold. You can get the MGM credit card and spend on that. I think that, if I'm not mistaken, requires $75,000 in spend on that card. Though there are some bonus categories that might make that more appealing than spending $50K on a Caesar's card.

So that's a potential option. The other option that I had completely overlooked, but that is probably relevant to at least some folks out there is that there's a status match from Royal Caribbean. And I think this is interesting for people who are into cruising because Royal Caribbean, you can match emerald status or higher to MGM gold. Now, Emerald status requires 55 points. And the way points work on most cruise lines, and I'm talking about points for the cruise line status now, not casino status, but for the cruise line status, emerald status, the 55 points.

one point for every night that you cruise in most state rooms, you're inside, your ocean view, your balcony, or two points for every night in a suite or higher. So that means that if you've done 55 nights lifetime with Royal Caribbean, you've got Emerald status. And, you know, if you're alternatively, if you did 28 nights lifetime in suites, then you'd have Emerald status with Royal Caribbean. And then you can just match that to MGM every single year. Nothing else you need to do. Totally just stop cruising with Royal Caribbean after that. And I mean, I don't know. I did a couple of of free cruises with Royal Caribbean when they had a match available. So I've got 10 nights down, you know, and so 45 more if there were seven night cruises, another seven cruises with Royal Caribbean.

Now I'm not going to go out and do that just for this. But I bet you there's a few listeners out there that have cruised with Royal Caribbean enough times to have the 55 point. I want to just back up a little bit here. Just for those who haven't maybe followed all along the history of the free cruises that we've talked about, why are we talking about getting, because Casino elite status. Just at a very, very high level. Just explain that before we keep going. That's a great question.

We should have kicked off with that. It's a great, great question. So because casinos, well, let me back this up, most of the big cruise lines. And when I say big, I mean big ships. So you're Royal Caribbean, Celebrity, Carnival, Princess, that sort of thing. They have casinos on board. And casinos in general want to draw in big time players so that they can lose money in the casino. And so a lot of cruise line casinos are willing to give away the cruise to players to get them on board in the hopes that these gamblers will lose more money in the casino than the cost of the cruise.

And that's a pretty good strategy for the cruise lines because you're a pretty captive audience. And so when I get back to the gambling later on, you know, whereas a Las Vegas casino, if they give you a free room offer to come out, you might go next door and gamble at the casino next door and not their casino. Whereas with a cruise line, that's not really an option. So you're stuck in their casino. So casino status matching comes into play because if you have high level status with a land-based casino program, well, then it's likely that you're a big-time gambler. Now, I say likely because I'm talking about some ways to get it without being a big-time gambler. You could have cruised on Royal Caribbean for 55 nights and never set foot in their casino,

but you've got Emerald Status with Royal Caribbean, and you can match that to MGM gold, which is going to make you look like you are a gambler to the cruise line casino. And that's what they're looking for. Now, once you get on board with one of these casino offers, there's no requirement to gamble. Like, nobody comes with a baseball bat to your cabin to be like, how come I haven't seen you in the casino? It's, you know, it doesn't walk up to your room saying. No, we gave me a free cruise, buddy. Nobody, nobody will bother you on board if you're not gambling.

So nobody's going to ask or anything. There's nobody from the casino that reaches. out. It's, you know, so anyway, you're going to look like a big time gambler is the idea. You want to try to look like you're a heavy hitting gambler to the casino, so they'll offer you a free cruise. And then if you do gamble some, you may very well get offers to come back. If you're not a gambler, they probably won't invite you back on a free cruise. But, you know, that's okay, too. It's all up to what you want. So if you have Royal Caribbean Emerald or higher, all you have to do is either call or email every year, and you can match to MGM gold and have that forever and ever, and that can be

useful for these matches, because MGM gold is a status that ordinarily requires quite a bit of gambling, just like Caesar's Diamond, ordinarily requires quite a bit of gambling. So these are statuses that will make you look like a heavy hitting gambler. If none of the above is applicable to you, then Founders Card is another potential path in with some caveats. So Founders Card right now, my understanding is one of the Founders card elite benefits is a status match to win black that can only be done in Las Vegas. Now I did hear of somebody doing it in Boston. It's not supposed to work in Boston. So I don't think it's going to work in Boston for the most part. If you live in Boston, I guess you could take a swing at it. But my understanding is it's only supposed to work at win in

Las Vegas. And Founders Card is one of those things that there's a lot of like free versions of Founders card. You can get that with JetBlue Mosaic status or you can sign up for a free trial. If you're on some sort of a free Founders Card program, this benefit's not going to be available to you. It's only going to be available if you're on like a paid version of Founders Card. And I say a paid version because there's a bunch of different pricing models out there. Like, I don't even know what it costs right now for Founders Card. I think you mean from $2.95 to $5.95 or $6.9. I don't even know what they charge something.

Yeah. Yeah. One way, one way to get the, a low price offer for Founders Card, the $2.95, range, maybe 250 range, is to sign up for a free trial or something and keep ignoring all the offers to buy into the permanent membership or the annual membership until it gets really low. And they'll keep, we'll keep spamming you over and over. In fact, the free version is basically a spam machine that you've signed up for. They will send you in all. onslaught of emails trying to get you to basically pay them some money that really, really,

yeah, I haven't noticed any other material benefits from the free version of Founders card other than getting lots of free email. Solicitations. Yeah. And I think I misspoke. I think I said Win Black, but I meant Win Platinum. So this will match you to win platinum at Win. and it's a version of wind platinum that's not going to do you much good in terms of win.

You need to, in order to unlock the benefits that exist at Wynn, like dining credit, spot credit, et cetera. You need two separate two night stays at Wynn in order to unlock those benefits. You don't get the cruise benefit even after that anymore. So the only reason for this to do this Founders card for Wynn status would be to pick up your Wynn platinum card in Las Vegas and bring it to an MGM property to match to gold or Caesars to match to. diamond. And I believe, as I say that, that the Caesar's diamond match might only be available in Atlantic City. Caesars is matching MGM gold to diamond and other statuses to diamond. In the past, that's only been for new players. But in 2026, it's now for both new and existing players, though I think that might only be an Atlantic City now that I say that out loud. So any of the above,

if you get Caesar's diamond or MGM gold via either any of the methods I mentioned for the two of those, or via the Founders card match to win and then win matching to either MGM or Caesars. Then you need to go to Atlantic City potentially for the next step in the match, and you can match around to Ocean Prime status. And so when I talk about matching casino statuses, matching in general requires going in person to the casino. The Royal Caribbean to MGM match is a rare exception. That can be done over the phone or via email.

but most of the rest of the matching opportunities for land-based casinos have to be done in person at the casino. So you would need to go to Atlantic City and you can take your Caesar's Diamond or your MGM gold card to the Hard Rock Casino in Atlantic City and match to their hard rock icon. Now, if you've done that in the past, there has to be 24 months of inactivity before you can do it again. And so when I say 24 months of inactivity, it means if you went last month and put your card in a machine, then that's activity and you're going to have to wait 24 months from then. But if you did this match 24 months ago and haven't touched your hard rock card since then, then you're eligible to potentially match again to Hard Rock icon. And then you can march your Hard Rock icon card down to Ocean Casino Resort in Atlantic City and match Hard Rock icon to Ocean Prime. Now that hard rock step in

the middle is necessary. You can't get Ocean Prime with Caesar's diamond status. or MGM gold, to my knowledge, I don't think you. I think you need to do the hard rock match in between. So you take that to Ocean. You match to Ocean Prime. Then Ocean Prime status gives you a couple of small benefits initially, but you do need to earn some tier credits to get the free cruise benefit. In the past, you could book the free cruise just from the match.

Now you have to earn 350 of their tier credits in order to unlock a complimentary cruise on Virgin Voyages. So that earning does not necessarily require a lot. I've read multiple data points from people that said that they were able to earn those 350 tier credits with a loss of somewhere between $1 and $200 or maybe $250. So relatively low loss, assuming that you're playing, again, machines that pay back highly to the player. And we'll talk about what those are under the gambling section in just a little bit here. But anyway, you do need to earn some tier credits at Ocean.

and then you get a complimentary Virgin Voyages cruise. And that can be nice because my understanding in the complimentary Virgin Voyages cruises are that they even include prepaid gratuities. So you don't have to pay for anything. I don't think with the Virgin Voyages cruises. I say I don't think because those are 18 and up. I haven't done one of those because we always travel with the kids.

Virgin Voyages are adults-only cruises. However, most people that cruise on them seem to enjoy Virgin Voyages cruises, release the reports that I've heard. So that could be a good benefit, particularly, you know, if you're able to do that, only losing a moderate amount of money at a machine in order to earn your 350 tier credits, you can potentially score a terrific deal. The other reason to do that is because once you have a free cruise offer from one cruise line, then you can take that free offer and potentially match that around for a whole bunch of other cruises. And so we'll get into that with the cruise line direct matches in a second. Before it gets to the direct matches, though, I want to mention. that if you have Caesar's Diamond, if you've gotten a Caesar's Diamond with any of the

techniques we talked about before, one of the benefits of Caesar's Diamond is that you can book a complimentary four-night stay at Atlantis Bahamas. Now, I say complimentary, you will be on the hook for the resort fee, but you don't pay that until checkout. So what I would say is if you get to Caesar's diamond, go ahead and make an Atlantis booking, even if you're not so sure you're going to actually make it work. You can cancel it later on. There's no fee to cancel. it or to change it. You can change the dates and everything. So just book something far out. The reason I say that is because I then took the booking confirmation from Atlantis that showed that I had an offer for four free nights. And I used that to send to cruise lines to say,

hey, listen, I have this offer for four free nights from Atlantis because ordinarily that would require some significant gambling at Atlantis and indicate that you're a gambler. And again, looking like a gambler is what you want if you want to get free cruises from the casinos. Okay. And let me also just back up a minute and say, if you're listening to all this and it seems overwhelming, we will have a link in the show notes to next post that details all this stuff. You do not have to memorize any of this right now. And also, you could just Google for frequent miler free cruises in 2026, something like that. And you should find his post. There you go. All right. So that's the land-based matching. That's the extent. of that. Now I say the extent to that. Also, if you live in an area with casinos, it can be worth looking and seeing, well, what else is available in the area. For example, Atlantic City is only about an hour from Philadelphia. And Rivers Casino in Philadelphia sometimes offers a match. Not always, but sometimes they offer a match. And so when they do, your Caesar's diamond status will match to

Rivers Platinum, I think it is. And that will give you a free Ocean View cruise on MS. That one's limited, I think, to just the Caribbean, just cruises in the Caribbean with MSC. MSC cruises in a lot of places. The one from Rivers, I believe, is only Caribbean cruises. However, MSC is nice because you don't pay port taxes on an MSC free cruise offers. So you'll pay a $400 deposit, but you get that back as free play in the casino and or match plays in the casino. And so there's no cost in terms of port taxes. You will pay gratuities on MSC and that's it.

So that's the closest to free out of the free cruise offers. Rivers is not always offering the match. So it's worth calling before you drive to Philadelphia if you don't otherwise have a reason to go there. But I bring that up because first of all, there are other rivers locations. To my knowledge, I don't think any of the other ones offer the free cruise benefit. I think it's just the one in Philadelphia. But there are other small local casinos that sometimes do have cruise benefits. So it could be worth looking at your local casinos and seeing, well, do they have a cruise benefit with one of the levels of

status and are they offering any status matching because sometimes smaller local casinos offer status matching opportunities. So it's worth looking into that if you've got a casino nearby. Okay, that's land-based matching. So that was number one. The second way I mentioned that we would talk about with cruise matches are direct matches from cruise lines for free cruises. And what I mean here is that you can often submit either proof of your status with land-based casinos or offers for free nights from land-based casinos and or offers for free cruises to competing cruise lines and tell them, listen, this is what others have offered me.

What can you offer me? And many of the major US cruise lines offer official match programs. And let me just pause you for a second here. So when you say a match program, before you're talking about matching status from one place to another, but now I think you're talking about matching an offer, right? Or something like that.

That is correct. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and that's a great point. Very important distinction to make here before we were talking about status matching. And yes, many of the cruise line casinos will match your offers from other casinos or whether they be land-based or cruise line casinos. So if you've done any of the matching in the past and you still have your free cruise information from the past, that might become pertinent and worthwhile to know here and to have some screenshots of. So I'll mention each of these different cruise lines. And so many of these cruise lines that offer this offer a way to submit online to show proof of your land-based casino status and or competing cruise offers or land-based casino offers. And many of them will allow you to attach multiple files. So what I do is I just kind of attach as much stuff as I can. So if I've matched around to any land-based casinos, Caesars, Hard Rock, Ocean Prime, whatever it may be, I'll attach pictures of my cards from of those programs. I have also taken old cruise confirmation. So for instance, I had a free MSC

balcony cruise a couple of years ago from doing some of this matching. And I just, I did it, printed to a PDF, my booking confirmation that showed that there was zero cost for the cruise fair. And I attached that to send to one of these programs and got a free cruise offer based on that, based on my old booking confirmation. Now, most of them are looking for current offers, but they don't always specify. And sometimes I've taken a screenshot of an offer and just the screenshot hasn't actually included the date anywhere. And I've rarely been asked to go back and take another screenshot. The shows a date. So if you've got, if you've got cruise offers, you might as well send them along, even if they're past offers, I mean, if they don't ask,

then yeah, show what you got. So do you just keep like a folder on your computer that's like all, all the old offers and so that you could just grab the whole set of them each time? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It makes it really, it makes. It makes it really, it makes. it really easy. And a lot of times, you know, when you're when you're taking a screenshot of an email, it doesn't necessarily have a date in there anywhere. So sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. But, but, uh, but anyway, I think that's useful for sending your screenshots along. And also, I have sent stuff that did have a date that was recently expired. But again, it, it doesn't always matter because a lot of these are just processed by a human being. And so it's up to that

human being, whether or not that matters to them. So I would say attach attaching more in general is is better because you give them more opportunity to say yes to say, oh, okay, well, this person's been able to get these free offers on other cruises. So some of the cruise lines that offer these, Carnival has a fun match, and that used to be possible to trigger a free cruise with just Caesar's Diamond status. Eventually, they wised up on that. So nowadays, you'll probably need to send them at least one additional status other than Caesar's Diamond or a free booking of some sort. Here's where that Atlanta State could come in handy, I think, if you're able to attack. that so it might be worth booking that if you've got Caesar's Diamond so that you can pass that

along to Carnival as well or if you've done other free cruises of course you can try that now that's supposed to be a one-time only match so I wouldn't expect to redo most of these direct cruise line matches the land-based casinos like Ocean Prime I mentioned Hard Rock was once every 24 months ocean prime similarly you can match to that once every 24 months so some of the land-based status benefit cruises can be repeated. These matches that I'm talking about here in many cases cannot be repeated, but if you haven't done all of them, then it's worth taking some screenshots of your old offers and sending them around. So Carnival offers a match. Holland America offers a match. The Carnival match can often be any cruise or just about any, not quite any

cruise, but most of their cruises usually qualify for the fun match offer. The initial offer from Carnival, in my case anyway, was an interior cabin, but I waited. a little bit. Eventually they sent a balcony cabin, whether or not they still will do that. I don't know, but that's worth knowing anyway that they did follow up with a better offer eventually. Holland America gives you a match for a free cruise, and their offer is geographically restricted. There are certain areas where you can do that cruise. For instance, Holland America doesn't allow their European cruises to be booked with their free cruise offer, but you can do Alaska, you can do the Caribbean, you can do the northeast of the United States. And I mentioned that,

Holland America doesn't allow the European cruises because I want to mention that if any of these programs email you back and don't give you an offer, you could always try pushing back and asking saying, oh, well, I have this other thing too. Can you consider that? Maybe they will. Maybe they won't. But if you're dealing with a person, it's worth at least giving them an opportunity to say yes. With Holland America specifically, my wife called to book that and she really wanted to book

a European cruise. And so she just asked, can I book this cruise with this? free cruise offer. And the phone agent booked it. Said, yeah, that's fine. And it's great. Amazing. And then her sister did the same thing, booked to the same cruise. And so that was great. Then like two weeks later, we got an email from Holland America saying, no, you weren't supposed to be able to book a European cruise. So we're going to have to cancel this. And so I pushed back. And I said, well, we already planned this trip to Europe. We got multiple family members coming along. We're all flying to Europe and back in business class

and have hotels booked and everything. And they called my bluff and asked me for the booking confirmations for everything. So I had to quickly scrabble and make those bookings, but I did. I made all those award bookings and set back screenshots of all the proof that we had made the travel arrangements. And sure enough, they wrote back and said, okay, we're going to honor it. Wow. Nice. So, you know, it can be worth at least asking because they have the latitude to do it. It's whether or not a human being is going to let you plead your case or not. So I mentioned that, not because I think you're going to be able to book a Holland, America, Europe, because you're probably not going to be able to. I'm sure they fixed that after that situation, but more so to say that

it can be, you know, it can be worth asking rather than not asking anytime you know, you have a question like that. All right. So Holland America I mentioned Margarita Ville at C. They were willing to match. Now, Margarita Ville C is different. In the post we have about these matches, there are direct links to submit your information for Carnival or Holland America or most of the other cruise lines are going to mention. Margarita Ville at C is one that they mention that they have an offer match on the website, but it doesn't tell you how to do it. So in our post, we've got the email address that you can email in order to email Margarita Villa at C and attach the competing cruise line offers that you have if you've had offers from other cruise lines or land-based

casinos. This is one where with Margaritaville at C, I attached an old MSC booking confirmation. I attached a screenshot of my Atlantis booking and I attached something else. I can't even recall what, but I think it was another offer that maybe even expired. And sure enough, they got back to me pretty quickly with an offer for a free cruise. And that was actually great. I wrote about it on Frequent Myler. We really enjoyed it. Margarita Ville. C is not for you if you want a roller coaster and you want like go-carts and a zip line. And Marguerite Vaux C doesn't have any of that kind of stuff. But I found it to be great for its laid-back atmosphere. And the cruise offer worked on, I think, I think any cruise on the islander. So, so you can take a look at what they have available.

I really enjoy Jimmy Buffett songs, but I don't know if I could stand a whole week or whatever, however long this is of nonstop Jimmy Buffett songs. Like, is that an issue? No, it's not 24 hours a day, Jimmy Buffett. So, no, I think you'll be okay. It's sprinkled in where it fits. But no, it's more of the theme of like the kind of laid back beachy sort of a theme. Sure. A lot of parrots and things like that.

So, I mean, maybe that'll get to you, the parrot theming. But we liked, they had a big, like, it was like, it was like, a mini golf course, but it was with cornhole. That was kind of fun. So it's stuff like that. That was just a little different. It was different enough from other cruise lines to make it kind of fun and interesting. In my post, I wrote about how one night for the show instead of having like a traditional show performance, which they did have some of, they had a talent show from staff members. So as people that you had seen working around the ship that were suddenly doing something entirely different, that, you know, so you can kind of see the talents they had or they did like a karaoke competition that they had done several rounds of and like one of the bars somewhere on board.

And then the finals were the show one night. Oh, that's fun. I was playing poker with at the poker table every night that I had no idea could sing. But my man, he did more than a feeling by Boston or whatever. And then I could sing. It was great. No, it wasn't even, it was a different. It was a, I can't think what the name of the song is.

Anyway, it doesn't matter. Margarita Villette C was a decent one so you can match to them via email. And the other thing about Margarita Villa at C is that if you're a moderate gambler, it's really easy to earn another cruise on Margarita Villa at C. Their new cruise loyalty program makes it pretty easy to earn the points for Silver Status, which means you'll end up getting another free cruise. So that can be one that's worth it for that if you just enjoy Marguerite DeVille. C. MSC offers another match also directly through their website. And again, this is one you can do. do without any port taxes. Now, the offer match on their website is via MSC USA, and that's when I didn't do directly through MSC. So I don't know whether they'll allow you to do an international MSC cruise with that or not. I have booked international MSC cruises with offers from casinos in the past. So it could be worth trying that. I mentioned that because one of the things I've come to love about cruising is cruising in Europe, because you can do a lot of these Mediterranean cruises and visit all these different cool cities that you probably wouldn't plan a whole trip around going to see

these little Mediterranean towns. And that's been one of my favorite things because we've discovered some new places that we never plan to trip around. And so if you're able to with MSC, that's great. They've also in the past on South Africa. I know some people who've booked free MSC cruises in Asia and all sorts of different places. So you've got a lot of options with MSC. Norwegian offers the first cruise on the house. So if you've never cruised with Norwegian before, you can do this one, if you have cruise with Norwegian before, you're not going to be able to do it. But this is another one where you submit online with your offers.

And I did this again with some of those offers from past years. And I just attached a bunch of those offers for Norwegian. And I was able to get the free cruise offer from Norwegian. That one was 14 days, up to 14 days anywhere in the world on any of the Norwegian itineraries. So it was only for an interior cabin. You had to pay to upgrade. And I should mention that many of these will match you to an interior or maybe an ocean view type of a cabin. And they will often offer the opportunity to upgrade. You can pay more if you want a balcony cabin on these. And so Norwegian is one where that cost was higher, a little bit higher than some of the others.

So I was less enthusiastic about the Norwegian offer because they also add an administrative fee. I think it's like $20 a person per day for the free cruise booking. So it's less free than most of the other ones. But a lot of people love Norwegian for the ships and the itineraries. And we've got a decent itinerary. And it's probably still a huge discount over just booking the cruise from the get-go, I would assume. It's relatively big. It's less big than some of these.

I mean, still probably a couple thousand dollars over what would have cost us otherwise to book it. And that might sound like a silly thing to be less enthusiastic. basketball, but to give a, for instance, with the Carnival Fund match, our first cruise that we booked in this was a European cruise where the balcony cabin for that particular cruise would have been over $5,000. And we paid about 600 bucks in for that. So a big, big difference between that. And like Norwegian, I think it's costing us about $2,100 or $2,200. So still significantly less than what it would cost to book that cruise. But it's not as close to free anyway. some of the others. Now, I say that Norwegian, if you're going to do that one, Google the Norwegian cruise first program because they have an opportunity where you can pay $250 to get $500 worth of credit for a future cruise. And when you go to book the free cruise offer, the agent can help you do that over the phone. So it gets you $250 off right there when you're making your deposit. And there's also an Amex offer for Norwegian, and you can trigger that

with this too. So I think it's $200 back on 1,000 right now. It's available on lots of cards. worth checking for that. I say right now, right now as we record this, and there are often amex offers for other of the cruise lines. So it's worth taking a look to see if you've got anything like that. And finally, Virgin Voyages also offers an offer match. There's is a little bit different than most of the others in that when you submit the offer match, you have to pick your first choice cruise and your second choice cruise. So you have to already know the date and the ship and the itinerary that you want when you go to to do this. Whereas the others, they give you the offer and then you can just kind of shop around and see and wait until the cruise you want becomes

available with virgin voyages you got to know when you submit which cruise you want so so that's different though there were cruises of up to nine nights available in the list a lot of them are four or five night cruises with virgin voyages it's not all of the cruises that are available i don't think anyway so you'll want to check out the casino player inquiry form and see is there something there that i want now those are adult only right they are yeah Yeah. So I mentioned that earlier. We talked about Virgin Voyages through Ocean Prime. Yes, those are 18 up. 18 and up adults only. And I believe my understanding is that it does include your drinks at the casino bar, even if you're not gambling on Virgin Voyages. And that, again, it includes the prepaid gratuities. I think it includes Wi-Fi. So Virgin Voyages is a deal that a lot of people are very enthusiastic about. It's one I haven't done. But a lot of people have really been happy with the offers from Virgin Voyages. So that's another option there. And I have a vague memory of that there's some easy ways to match to get Virgin Voyages like Silver Stata or some kind of status so that you can get some extra other benefits on board. There are my understanding, though, is that the benefits didn't stack.

So I don't think the benefits on Virgin. I don't think people were able to get their elite status benefits on the casino offer. Though, I'm glad you mentioned that because MSC also offers a status match and you can status match from your. land-based hotel status. So if you've got Hilton Diamond or Hayek Globalist or Marriott Platinum or there may have even applied to Hilton Gold or other statuses, I can't recall the full list. But MSC does a status match. You can pretty easily match to MSE Diamond status. And then that gives you a few small benefits. You're going to get a bottle of sparkling wine when you get on board and some chocolate and bathrobes and an invitation to a cocktail party where the drinks are free.

and it used to include priority boarding for tender ports. I don't think they have that anymore. I think it's just priority embarkation and debarkation now. The tender ports was really nice because if you get one of those tender ports, we have to take a boat in order to get to shore. It was nice to skip the entire line with MSC. Diamond status. Yeah.

Yeah, it was very useful a number of times. But I believe they cut that this past year. So I think that's no longer a benefit. But it's worth looking into and seeing because if, if it is still a benefit, then it might be worth matching just for that. And certainly the priority embarkation was nice, too, on a couple of the MSC cruises. Though MSC is a really unique one in that most of their cruises, perhaps not true for the ones that depart the United States, but most of their cruises, they sell the cruise from all of the port stops, which is very unique. So most of the big cruise lines, everybody gets on at the same time and everybody gets off at the same time.

But with MSC, if they stop it, you know, if they start in Rome and they go to, you know, I don't know, Naples and Malta and, I don't know, Nice, let's say, then they sell the cruise from Naples and Malta and Nice. And so some people are getting on and some people are getting off at every stop. And that's interesting for a lot of reasons. I mean, one thing that I kind of liked about that was it meant the lines were not terribly long when you were getting on because they weren't boarding the entire ship at once. So that was actually kind of nice with MSC. But, uh, You know, you don't necessarily get the same experience if you're someone who wants to make friends that you hang out with all week on your cruise ship because people are constantly getting on and off. But anyway, that's that for those. So those are some of the direct match opportunities. Now, Princess has also had one in the past. Though when I looked it up, when I went to write the post, the URL wasn't the same as it was before. And I wasn't sure about the new URL. It was coming up funny on my page. So I didn't include that one, but Princess is another one that might be worth looking at. They were similarly more expensive than most of the others on their free cruise offer. So I haven't actually taken the free princess cruise, but that may be of interest. So I mentioned that. All right. So those were number one and number two for ways to get free cruises. Number three is gambling. And so I wrote gambling on board. It might take less gambling than you expect. And so the reason I say that is, as I said before, you are a captive audience on a cruise ship. So if they think that you're willing to come into the casino and gamble, then they know you don't have anywhere else to go to do it. And so the threshold,

I think, for earning free cruises or getting free cruise offers in the future is lower than what you might expect if most of your past gambling has been Las Vegas or Atlantic City, where, you know, somebody recently on a podcast, I think I was on, said, you know, if you had a gambling budget of $1,000 a day in Las Vegas, that it's meaningless to the casinos in Las Vegas because they have so many people coming in and gambling like that all the time. Whereas on a cruise line, that might make you a really heavy hitter on your cruise. And it's enough that your expected loss might be high enough for them. The incremental cost of taking you on board if they have a cabin that wouldn't otherwise sell is really low. So the threshold for giving you a free cruise is lower than you might

think, particularly in situations where they know they aren't going to sell all the cabins. I've got this spoiling inventory. So I think, and from experience, it does seem to to be the case, and from talking to other people who do this, it also seems to be the case, that your gambling level does not need to be nearly what it would be at a land-based casino in order to get what could be a great value if you enjoy cruising. But you'll want to be strategic about how you do it. So if you're interested in gambling with an eye towards continuing to earn free cruises, there are plenty of sites out there that give you strategies. The basic gist of strategy for this is going to be starting with machines that offer a high

return. And when I say that, typically video poker is what people that are trying to just generate gambling credit do, because video poker has like a one to two percent house edge on it, which means that over the long haul, which is, of course, an infinite sample size, you would lose one to two percent. And so you could put through a lot of money without losing a lot of money over the long haul. Now, of course, variance could mean that you could lose more than that or you could win. And that's also assuming that you make a good judgment, right, about how you play video poker. Yes. Yes.

So there are training apps that you can download in order to learn that'll tell you when you've made a mistake and how to play. And whether or not this interest you is going to vary a lot from person to person because I can imagine there are some people who are like, I'm not going to download an app and play free video poker to learn how to play. and then I have to sit at a machine for hours doing that on a casino. So, or on a cruise ship or at any casino, and that's fine. I mean, I can totally see where that won't appeal to everyone. Some people, though, look at that and say, oh, well, I can put a lot of money through the machine and potentially earn something that's way more valuable to me in the form of

free cruise offers in the future. And so that's a popular technique is video poker because, like I said, you can download a free training app. And once you get yourself up to like, you know, 97, 98% accuracy on your decision-making, then you can go through a lot of hands at the machine in a shorter period of time and potentially be putting through a lot of money. And that, again, makes you look like you're a big-time gambler. It's willing to put a lot of money into the machine and play a lot of hands per hour, even though your theoretical loss is not going to be necessarily quite as high.

Now, when I mentioned theoretical loss, that's a whole other thing that you can kind of delve into how casinos figure you're theoretical and how much that's going to come into play. There's a lot of stuff out there. You can read Travels, work, does a lot of work in that type of things. So there are a number of other sites that specialize in that, but video poker is one method. If you're somebody who says, I'm kind of interested in this, but I'm nervous about that variance. Maybe there's only a one or two percent house edge, but maybe I'm going to make mistakes. Maybe I'll be on the wrong end of that variance. I don't want that. How can I still gamble and know what I'm going to lose in advance? And so a potential method there, and I say potential, because there are people out there that are really into this stuff that will tell you that they would never do this because it involves a definite loss.

But I think there are people out there who probably want to get rid of the variance. And so if that's you, there are machines where you can play video roulette and you can theoretically play all of the numbers, including the zeros and double zeros. And your expected loss is going to be about, or not expected, your definite loss is going to be about, I think, 5.26%. if I remember the math correctly. And so if you say, okay, well, I'm willing to lose X amount, you just play all the numbers on roulette if the machine allows for that, then you could potentially, again, say, okay, I'm willing to lose this much and just continue to play those hands

until you've lost that much. Now, I mentioned that specifically because if I did the math correctly, I did the math on trying to figure out how much you would have to lose in order to get Caesar's diamond status. If you went to Caesar's on a 10x tier credit day, on one of the properties that offers that. I intend to test this out. And so if you were to go to a Caesar's on a day that offers 10x tier credits and say,

okay, I want to earn diamond status, but I want to know up front how much it's going to cost me. If you played it at a quarter machine, you played all the numbers, you're going to lose on every spin because the way it pays out. The math works out to give the casino that edge. So if you play everything, you're going to lose on every spin. But if I calculated it right, it's going to be 1,400-something spins. I figured out the loss would be $737 in order to earn Caesar's Diamond. Now, is Caesar's Diamond worth $737 to you?

I wouldn't be on its own. The benefits of Caesar's Diamond waive the resort fees, you get $100 celebration dinner and some other small benefits in the casino that wouldn't be worth $737 to me. However, if you're able to take that and then match around and get some free cruises with it, then it might be worth $737 to you. or maybe it's worth getting the Caesar's credit card and earning some tier credits from spend and then bridging the gap with less than $737 in a way that you're going to know exactly how much you're going to lose.

Now, I say 737. That depends a little bit on the machine you pick because you need to make sure that it's a machine that's returning the tier credits at the rate that I use to calculate that. I did not put this method in the post. So I'm going to tell you if you want to earn Caesar's diamond, then that's a whole separate research thing. And I do intend to try that out and probably write about it in the Facebook group to see how that works out in terms of figuring out how to play that, how you might be able to do that at scale and how much it'll cost you. So stay tuned for more information about that. We'll talk about that once I've tested out some different theories on that on a 10x day.

But anyway, it's possible to do. And you could apply that same strategy to the cruise itself and say, okay, I'm going to do that on the cruise. I'm going to lose this much and see what offers I get. And I've heard of people saying that they would set a budget like that and say, okay, you know what? I'm willing to lose $800 on this particular cruise because I think that might get me two or three more free cruises. And I'm willing to make that investment on this cruise so I can do a couple more.

Now, there's no guarantee of that. So that's a gamble in and of itself. So whether or not that appeals to you is going to depend on your risk tolerance. But I think that there are some people that will find that worthwhile. That to me sounds like more painful than going on one of these massive cruises itself. If I understood you right, you're sitting there at a machine playing video roulette, picking all possible options every spin and spinning 1,400 times, something like that. So you got to sit at the machine forever. Well, but you don't need to repick.

Once you've picked, like if you let's say, picked all the numbers. it stays in there. So all you're really doing is hitting spin over and over again. So, yes, that that's never appealed to me to be honest. Like I'm talking about this. And like slot machines have never been of interest to me before this. I enjoy going to a casino. I like to play poker and I like table games.

I've always liked the social end of that. And I enjoy blackjack or that sort of thing. Slot machines like always seemed like craziness to me. I was never. I know some people love it. but never seemed like something I was interested in. Specifically because of that. I don't want to sit there and like press, press, press, press, press, press, press.

Not only that. But now I kind of do. You're taking out the one fun thing, which is the chance of winning. By picking everything, you've eliminated that. Right, right. So all you're left with is mind-numbing way to slowly eat up over $700 of your dollars and then get status. Yeah. Anyway.

Yes. You're absolutely right. It is. Yeah. I understand the technique. It just sounds. really, really painful to me. Yeah, and it's not, it's not how I would attack this. I would attack this more with the video poker angle, only because you may end up on the positive end of that variance.

So there's at least that chance. Like you said, that makes it a little bit more fun to me, that there's the chance that you could end up hitting. In fact, I talked to somebody recently at an in-person event who would hit like four royal flushes in the day that they went to go do this. And so they had come out significantly ahead. But of course, you know, you could end up being behind two. So there's both sides of that. And all of that should come with the caveat that maybe I should have led with, but I will put here that don't risk more than you can afford to lose. A lot of people fall into problem gambling. I mean, that's why they build those places and why they have the sports book apps and all of those things. And it is an addictive thing. And I feel like people that are into miles and points are probably more likely, believe it or not, I would say, to become problem gamblers. And the reason I say that, that. Maybe I'm wrong. I haven't done any scientific study, but is that our hobby gets you really used to winning. There's so many big wins. You're constantly getting the big redemptions. You're earning tons of points per dollar. You're getting these sign-up bonuses. And so it can feel,

you can feel invincible. That invisibility, that false invincibility can really build easily, I think, in this hobby. And so I think it's easy to get into that and start to feel invincible and then start to make some big mistakes. And so I cautioned people. I haven't written a lot about the gambling angle, even though the math appeals to me, I haven't written much about the gambling angle, mostly because I just don't want to be responsible for sending somebody down that path. Though, of course, now we've talked about it enough today that, hopefully I haven't sent anybody down that. Hopefully, that caveat's enough for people to say, uh, maybe that's not for me if you,

if you don't feel like it is. Makes sense. All right, that wraps up this week's main event. Now, just to let you know, starting this week, we've decided to move the question of the week to a standalone episode. So stay tuned for a question of the week coming separately soon. All right. If you've enjoyed today's episode and you want more of this in your email inbox each day or each week,

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like to be considered for a question of the week, you can send those to send it to mailbag at frequent myler.com. Bye everybody. If you love travel, but don't always have time to plan, we've got a podcast for you. It's called Travel in 10. And in every episode, in about 10 minutes, we give you a smart, practical overview of destinations all around the world. We cover what to see, where to stay, where to eat, and what actually matters when you're planning out a truck. It's designed for real life.

Listen on the way to the airport, in the car, or while you're thinking about your next getaway. So if you want expert advice, zero fluff, and travel inspiration that you can actually use, search for travel and tin wherever you listen to podcasts, or you can also find us at boyescape.com. Hi, I'm Mike Siegel, host of the Travel Tales podcast, and I'm a stand-up comedian who's been touring the world for years, and when I'm not traveling for work, I'm traveling for fun.

And when I'm not traveling at all, I'm talking with friends, influencers, expats, and other people from all walks of life about the thing I'm most passionate about, travel. So if you want to hear a fun conversation about travel and maybe even learn a few things along the way, check out the Travel Tales Podcast with Mike Siegel wherever you get your podcasts.