It's now easier to track and manage your Royal Caribbean casino rewards, thanks to a website overhaul.
The new Casino Royale website is available to guests, which features a better integrated login, sleeker design, and makes managing offers easier.
The casino loyalty program is more popular than ever, but its website had been an old design that wasn't mobile device optimized and required guests to enter their Crown and Anchor Society number instead of their usual Royal Caribbean login credentials.
The new site has an easier to follow navigation, and works well on all devices.
It's also a step forward in the prominence of the cruise line's casino offerings.
Better design
About two weeks ago, emails went out to alert guests a new casino site was coming, and now it's here.
The new site promises to make it easier to track your offers and view your personalized dashboard of tier credit earnings conveniently in one location.
After logging in with the same credentials you would use to access the main Royal Caribbean site, you can link your casino account to other partner casino programs.
Royal Caribbean has loyalty matching with a few other casino programs, including Hard Rock Casino and MGM Casino.
The new site makes it easier to quickly see how many points you've accumulated, your status, and offers you may have waiting.
The offers, in particular, are the most useful feature since they are a way to redeem free cruises.
Players that gamble enough on a Royal Caribbean ship can earn complimentary future cruises to go on, based on either how much they wagered on a sailing or simply an instant offer.
You can now easily pick an offer to use, and then actually book the cruise through the website instead of having to call in to redeem it.
There is a list of sailings to choose from, and then a way to pick an individual booking.
The site takes users through the options of redeeming or applying the offer, and selecting which complimentary sailing they'd like to sail on.
The new site replaces not only an old site, but PDF documents that used to be the only way to track the options players had available.
How to earn a free cruise from the casino
If you want to earn complimentary casino cruise offers, here's what you need to know.
A reminder that gambling is very addictive and is not for everyone. Know your limits, and you could easily spend much more in gambling losses than what you could get on a cruise. There is definitely a bigger picture to consider.
The concept is simple: you can earn one point for every few dollars you wager (not wins or losses, just how much you play). By far, you'll want to play slots (instead of table games) to earn points faster.
At the casino host desk, there is a sheet that lists how many points during that sailing you need to reach certain reward thresholds.
Depending on your sailing, the lowest milestone could be a few hundred points or closer to 1,000. The lowest tiers offer an inside stateroom for free and just pay taxes and port fees.
If you get more points, you can qualify for better cabins and/or more free play to go with it.
Casino Royale may add instant offers to your account, which are incentives to come back to cruise (and hopefully gamble). There's no rhyme or reason I've determined as to how these are offered.
In addition, if you can reach the Prime status within Casino Royale, then you can qualify for free annual cruise too.
A deepening casino integration
The new Casino Royale website coincides with Royal Caribbean's push into attracting more casino players.
A trend over the last few years has been to pursue and cater to more of its gamblers onboard.
Royal Caribbean has steadily been expanding its casinos on select ships, which has involved replacing public venues with new casino space.
On some Oasis Class ships, the Crown Lounge and Attic areas were replaced in order to make expand the casino.
On Freedom of the Seas, the wine bar was replaced with a non-smoking casino.
Not only are there more gambling areas on these ships, but they're non-smoking venues.
Royal Caribbean hasn't officially announced a change in policy to cater more to non-smoking gamblers, but it's my guess it has to do with maximizing onboard revenue as it does addressing a need passengers have been asking for.
