Gifting Onboard Credits

[lilalila]

I’ll have leftover OBC from my travel agent after using the money to pay the “normal” gratuities/service fees.  Can I give the remaining amount to our waiter/asst. waiter and room steward?  Has anyone done this? How?  

[Best Cat Mom]

We use up "extra" OBC by turning it into cash in the casino. Choose a slot machine, follow the instructions to load money from your cruise card to the slot machine, then cash out. Take the paper receipt from the cash out to the cashier and they will give you cash. Spend the cash however you wish. 🙂

[lilalila]

I forgot to mention I'm looking to do this on the Seashore (if a ship or class of ships make a difference)

[Best Cat Mom]

We've done it that way on the Sea class (Seaside) as well as the Fantasia class (Divina). Should work fine for you.

[luckyinpa]

On 9/20/2023 at 7:26 PM, Best Cat Mom said:

We use up "extra" OBC by turning it into cash in the casino. Choose a slot machine, follow the instructions to load money from your cruise card to the slot machine, then cash out. Take the paper receipt from the cash out to the cashier and they will give you cash. Spend the cash however you wish. 🙂

 

is there a fee for this? and do you have to play through at all? ive read on some lines if you load  your machine you have to play through some amount to get it to print out and in some cases people have gotten locked out from drawing down any money for their cruise

[Best Cat Mom]

No fee. You don't need to play at all. We just sailed Seaside last week and the week before. We loaded up several times to cash out our OBC since it was too much to take out at once. We played a bit with two separate receipts, but cashed out the other having never used it.

[ajoneen]

It boggles my mind that someone would get more in OBC then cover the gratuities.  I must be doing something wrong-  I got $50 for my next cruise. 

[Best Cat Mom]

Many Travel Agents "reward" their customers with high amounts of OBC. We had over $1K last cruise, around 15% of the total spend on our YC cabin.

[DaKahuna]

17 hours ago, ajoneen said:

It boggles my mind that someone would get more in OBC then cover the gratuities.  I must be doing something wrong-  I got $50 for my next cruise. 

 

 We received $200 from MSC and approximate 8% of our cruise  fare from our TA.  

 

[lcpagejr]

10 minutes ago, DaKahuna said:

 

 We received $200 from MSC and approximate 8% of our cruise  fare from our TA.  

 

Yes..seems pretty common. I use online booking agencies (.com's) and I got $800 OBC for our YC booking

[luckyinpa]

17 hours ago, ajoneen said:

It boggles my mind that someone would get more in OBC then cover the gratuities.  I must be doing something wrong-  I got $50 for my next cruise. 

 

takes time to find a decent TA. i got lucky and got one on a compete site and he generally gives me shy of 10% on my suites and the cruise lines usually toss in a bit. but a balcony room will never get as much as a suite.  also depends on lines. sometimes my TA takes the discount right off the price. but mostly it's listed as Gift OBC.

 

for example one time i just got a mini suite on princess and it was a a small discount directly off the princess price then princess tossed in just 50 bucks.  but on my once in a lifetime retirement cruise my TA offered to mail me 2300 after the cruise but the 800 that celebrity is giving me is not refundable so ill have to take it out through the slot machine

[luckyinpa]

i just noticed on my TA invoice it says 500 non refundable OBC so i wrote to him and his accounting dept will change it to a check

 

he also told me MSC made it against the rules to discount cruises so he cannot just discount my pricing. has anyone else gotten a discount price up front recently?

[Ed342]

On 9/26/2023 at 11:15 AM, luckyinpa said:

i just noticed on my TA invoice it says 500 non refundable OBC so i wrote to him and his accounting dept will change it to a check

 

he also told me MSC made it against the rules to discount cruises so he cannot just discount my pricing. has anyone else gotten a discount price up front recently?

Sure, the discount comes from Voyagers Club, either 5% or 10% which is applied when you are booked. The other way to lower the cost is to keep checking fares. They do go down and you should be able to cancel and rebook. MSC doesn't refare like the other cruise lines.