Hi everyone! I've read as many topics I can find on the casinos onboard and I'm left super confused at what happened with our last cruise.
We sailed on Symphony back in April. My first cruise and my boyfriend's third. We both ended up getting fairly lucky at the casino (for people who don't gamble often or much). I won $800 on that Key Master arcade machine (probably all of my luck for the next 5 years), he won around $1600 on a slot machine pull, and we both got a couple good hands in 3-card poker. We both definitely left up from what we came with, miraculously, but we're not talking thousands and thousands.
Ever since then, we have been receiving offers in the mail for free cruises from the casino. Mine are always interior, his get up to Jr. Suite level (including some Oasis Class ships), we assume because he both bet more and won more than I did. A few have been X-amount off but 90% are straight-up complementary. And these aren't occasional...we're both getting the physical offers in our mailbox on a near weekly basis, even after we redeemed one.
Now obviously I'm not complaining - we're heading out on the Navigator on September 6th, having paid nothing but tax for a balcony room! I just really don't understand. I don't think I played any slots at all, and he played for less than an hour on one day. All the rest of the time we played table games, just 3-card poker and roulette. We didn't bet an outrageous amount of money. From everything I've read both here and anywhere else I could find people discussing it on the internet, you win the big points on slots and don't really get much from table games anymore after they changed the points system. So what's the deal? Neither of us know what our point totals are right now; we didn't really understand how any of that worked so we didn't check before we left the ship.
Obviously we can just check up on it all when we get onto Navigator but I figured I'd ask here to see if anyone has any insight! We'd like to direct our money into the right areas while we're in the casino so the offers keep coming. One cruise in and I'm absolutely hooked on the whole cruise experience! ?