Cruise Casino Disclosure Scorecard: Who Publishes What
Last reviewed: October 2026
Only two cruise lines publish enough to let you calculate your position before you sail: Royal Caribbean and Celebrity. Both publish earn rates, tier ladders and monthly certificate charts. At the other end, MSC publishes no earn rate, no tiers, no expiry policy and no FreePlay rate. Nobody publishes a table-game formula.
The scorecard
Four things determine whether a casino program is plannable: the earn rate, the tier thresholds, the certificate or redemption chart, and the FreePlay conversion rate. Here is who publishes each.
| Line | Earn rate | Tier ladder | Certificate chart | FreePlay rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Royal Caribbean | Official | Official | Yes, 13 rungs monthly | No (player-verified only) |
| Celebrity | Official | Official | Yes, 12 rungs monthly | No |
| Norwegian | Official | Official | No | No |
| Carnival | Official | Official | No | No |
| Holland America | Official | No | No | No |
| Virgin Voyages | Secondary | Official | No | No |
| Princess | Secondary | None exists | Yes, images only | No |
| MSC | No | No | No | No |
Read that column by column and the pattern is stark. Earn rates are mostly published. Tier ladders are mostly published. Certificate values almost never are. FreePlay conversion rates are published by nobody at all.
Royal Caribbean is the only line with a searchable certificate ladder
Club Royale publishes a 13-rung instant-certificate ladder running from 400 points up to 40,000, refreshed monthly via flyer. That makes it the only program at sea where you can look up, in advance, what a specific point total is worth in cruise value.
Celebrity publishes 12 rungs as monthly PDFs, from 600 points for an Interior up to 40,000 points for a Sky Suite with $2,500 in FreePlay. That is close behind, and arguably more generous at the top.
Princess technically publishes a nine-rung Sea You Soon chart that scales with voyage length, but only as images. The information exists and has never been searchable, which functionally means most players never see it.
Norwegian, Carnival, Holland America, Virgin and MSC publish no chart at all.
FreePlay conversion is the universal blank
Not one of the eight lines publishes how points convert to FreePlay dollars.
Celebrity comes closest by naming a FreePlay amount inside its certificate rungs, but the underlying conversion rate is unstated. A secondary source suggests 50 points equals $1 on Celebrity. Royal Caribbean’s roughly $2 welcome FreePlay is player-verified, not published.
For Carnival, Norwegian, Virgin, Holland America, Princess and MSC there is no published rate and, for most, no reliable secondary figure either. If you are counting on FreePlay as part of the value, you are counting on a number nobody has told you.
Our explainer on FreePlay covers what it is actually worth once you account for the fact that FreePlay is wagered, not handed to you in cash.
Table games: zero disclosure, fleetwide
Every line rates table play by game type, average bet and time played. Not one publishes the formula that turns those inputs into points or comp value.
That is a complete blank across eight companies. It means a table player cannot compare lines at all, cannot verify a rating, and cannot forecast anything. Slots are the only game type where cross-line comparison is even possible.
Why the gaps matter more than the numbers
A published rate is a commitment. An unpublished one is a courtesy that can change silently.
Princess is the case study. Its slot rate was roughly $2.50 per point until about October 2024, then became $2. Princess did not announce the change, and its terms reserve the right to change the ratio without notice. Players found out by comparing statements.
That is the practical consequence of non-disclosure. You cannot audit what you were not told, you cannot plan against it, and you cannot dispute it. The MSC situation is the extreme version: every specific MSC figure circulating online is something MSC has never stated, which makes all of them unusable for planning.
What good disclosure actually buys you
It does not buy you an edge. Nothing here beats the house. Measured cruise slot RTP is 83% to 91%, worse than Nevada’s roughly 93% statewide, and the comps are a partial rebate on that gap rather than an offset to it.
What disclosure buys you is the ability to decide before you play instead of hoping afterward. If you know a certificate rung sits at 2,500 points and you know a point costs $5, you know the certificate costs $12,500 of coin-in and roughly $1,100 to $2,100 in expected losses. Then you can judge whether the cruise is worth that. On MSC you cannot run that calculation at all.
The right conclusion is usually the unglamorous one in losing less beats comps: playing less costs you less than any comp returns.
Educational explanation only. No real-money gambling happens on LearnTheOdds.
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