What’s the Best Way to Book Cruise Excursions with Rewards?

While there are a handful of co-branded cruise credit cards available, most people use flexible travel credit cards like the Barclays Premier or Capital One Venture to cover cruises with rewards. But even then, it’s not always easy to cover the total cost of your vacation with points and miles. You may have to fly to a cruise port, using valuable airline miles in the process. You may also need to use cash to pay for cruise excursions if you don’t want to stay on your ship or walk off and find something free to do.

Getting Cruise Excursions Covered with Rewards

Fortunately, you can use points and miles to pay for cruise excursions or things to do right off your ship. One of the easiest ways to do this is to sign up for a cash-back card and lets you earn points you can redeem however you want. With the Chase Freedom or Citi Double Cash, for example, you could rack up points to redeem for cruise excursions, a fancy lunch off the ship, or whatever else you want.

Obviously, there are many cruise ports where an expensive, drawn-out excursion isn’t necessary anyway. Maybe you just want to sit on a local beach within walking distance, or perhaps you want to walk around the port and shop. In that case, some basic points for cash-back might work best since you could redeem for statement credits to cover your bill.

But, obviously cash-back isn’t the only type of rewards used for cruise ports and excursions. Other strategies to consider include:

• Booking excursions through Chase Ultimate Rewards – One of my favorite ways to book excursions with rewards is via the Chase Ultimate Rewards program. This program, which is accessible if you have travel cards like the Chase Sapphire Preferred or Chase Sapphire Reserve, lets you book similar cruise excursions similar to those you can find on Viator.com. You can redeem your points directly for food tours, snorkeling trips, museum entries, and almost anything else you can find on the Viator site.
• You can also use flexible travel credit to cover cruise excursions, and this may work better if you prefer to book excursions through your cruise operator. When we went on the MSC Poesia recently, we booked a day trip to Ancient Olympia and its museum through our tour operator and covered it with points from my old Barclays Arrival Plus World Elite MasterCard. Since the excursion was booked through the cruise operator, it coded as travel on my bill. This made it easy to redeem flexible travel credit to cover the expense.

Final Thoughts

When you’re planning a cruise with rewards, don’t forget that your cruise fare is only part of the deal. You’ll have to drive or fly to your cruise port, and you’ll have to cover any excursions or activities you hope to do while at port.

The good news is, there are all kinds of rewards cards that can cover the various elements of your trip. Your best bet is researching cards and programs early to get as much of your trip covered as you can.

 

What is your favorite way to cover cruise excursions with rewards? Why?