Carnival Rewards is live, and casino points now feed the new system

Just saw a couple writeups this week, including Carnival’s own help pages and a Travel Weekly piece, saying Carnival Rewards officially went live on September 1. The part that caught my eye for our crowd: casino play now also feeds the new loyalty system, with stars tied to earned casino points and reward points tied to casino points left at the end of the sailing. That’s an interesting wrinkle. Back in the old days, cruise loyalty and casino mailers lived in separate neighborhoods and barely waved at each other. Sounds like they still do in one sense, since casino offers are still their own animal, but now the play can spill over into the broader loyalty side too. Anybody sailed since September 1 and gotten a clean explanation onboard? I’m curious whether this changes how folks track their play, or if it’s just one more line on the spreadsheet.

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I haven’t sailed post-9/1 yet, but I did poke around the help pages after Denise sent me one of those “read this and explain it to me” texts. My read is the big thing to watch is earned casino points versus whatever converts over at the end, because those sound like two different lanes. That may make folio screenshots and kiosk photos a little more useful than they used to be, just for keeping your own notes straight. What I’m really curious about is whether anybody onboard got the same explanation from casino host, Players Club desk, and guest services. On Carnival, three answers on one question is sometimes the appetizer, entree, and dessert.

That split is the part I’d want documented before reading too much into it. If stars are based on earned casino points during the sailing, but reward points are based on casino points remaining at the end, then timing and redemption behavior may matter for how the account looks afterward. Not saying it changes offers, just that it could make post-cruise recordkeeping messier. If anyone has sailed under the new setup, I’d love to know where the conversion actually showed up first: kiosk, hub app, folio, or only after you got home. And was this on slots only, or did they explain table play at all?

I haven’t been on since the switch, but the wording makes me think we need to track two snapshots, not one. One number for total casino points earned during the cruise, another for the balance left when they cut things off on the last night. For spreadsheet people, that means I’d grab: one kiosk photo mid-cruise one late on the final night one folio shot after zeroing out anything you plan to use My main table-game question is whether rated blackjack hours/theo feed this the same way, or if the loyalty side is basically slot-point driven with tables converted behind the curtain.