Cruise Casino Data: Sources, Confidence and Reuse

Every number we publish about cruise casino programs, with its evidence class and its source. Reuse it with attribution.

Last reviewed: August 2026 to July 2026

We compiled this because nobody else had. Cruise lines treat casino earn rates as something between a footnote and a secret, and most of the figures circulating online trace back to no operator statement at all. This page is the provenance layer: what we publish, how confident we are in each figure, and what you are free to do with it.

How every figure is graded

Each number carries one of four evidence classes. The grade travels with the figure everywhere it appears on the site, so you never have to guess whether a rate is policy or one person's observation.

ClassWhat it means
OfficialThe cruise line states it on its own website.
Player-verifiedNot published anywhere, but observed first-hand and photographed or redeemed by a player. Weaker than a published figure only because it is one sailing's observation rather than stated policy.
SecondaryReported by a third party and traceable to no operator statement.
Not publishedThe line does not publish it and we have no first-hand observation. We print nothing rather than repeat a number we cannot stand behind.

Slot and video poker earn rates

Dollars of coin-in per point. Points are not a common currency across lines, so any comparison that comes out in points rather than dollars of coin-in will mislead you: a Carnival point costs $2 of coin-in, a Royal Caribbean point $5.

LineProgramSlotsVideo pokerEvidenceAs of
Royal Caribbean Club Royale $5 $15 Official July 2026
Celebrity Cruises Blue Chip Club $5 $15 Official August 2026
Carnival Players Club $2 $5 Official July 2026
Norwegian (NCL) Casinos At Sea $5 $10 Official July 2026
Virgin Voyages Sea Roller Rewards $5 $10 Secondary July 2026
Holland America Players Club $2 $5 Official August 2026
Princess Cruises Players Advantage $2 $5 Secondary July 2026

Table games are absent for every line on purpose. All of them rate table play by average bet multiplied by time, and none publishes the formula.

The lines that publish nothing

This is the part we would most like other people to repeat, because the absence is itself the finding. For MSC Cruises, every earn rate you will find online is a number the cruise line has never stated. We publish none.

  • MSC Cruises (Signature Player Rewards): no published earn rate. MSC states plainly that a comp cruise carries NO taxes or fees. Royal Caribbean and Celebrity both make you pay them.

If you have sailed one of these lines and have a photograph of a rate card, a statement or a redemption receipt, send it over. That is how the player-verified figures on this site came to exist.

Sources

Each line's own page, which is what the official grades are read from. Where a figure is player-verified, the source is a named sailing rather than a URL, and the page carrying that figure says so.

Using this data

You may reproduce any figure from this dataset, with attribution and a link to the page it came from. That includes the comparison tables, the certificate ladder and the tier thresholds. We would rather the numbers travelled with their evidence class attached than travelled stripped of it, which is what happens to every cruise casino figure eventually.

Two things we ask, neither of them enforceable, both of them the reason this page exists:

  • Carry the evidence class. "Player-verified" and "official" mean different things, and dropping the distinction is how an observation becomes a myth.
  • Carry the date. These programs change without announcement. Princess repriced its entire chart and published nothing.

A citation in the usual shape:

LearnTheOdds, "Cruise Casino Loyalty Programs Compared", https://learntheodds.com/comps/cruise-lines/ (accessed [date]).

Corrections

If a figure here is wrong, we want to know more than we want to be right. Rates move quietly and a page that is accurate in July is not automatically accurate in November. Tell us and include what you saw and when. Our methodology covers how the rest of the site's numbers are produced and checked.

Nothing on these pages links you to a place to gamble. No operator sign-ups, no casino affiliate links, no referral codes.