Cash vs credit card for onboard spending

I will use my credit card for the charges but will pay it off with cash the last night. On a rare occasion I will have to leave charges to the credit card.

At home, every purchase goes on a credit card (never a debit card) and we pay the bill in full every month. We’re not impulse buyers so there are never any “surprises” when the statement comes. So, on a ship, we always link our account to a credit card. Like on land, we’ve never had a surprisingly large bill at the end (some cruises there’s almost no onboard spending at all) and always pay the credit card in full at the next billing period. Plus, we earn airline miles for everything we purchase to get us to our next cruise!

We always use a credit card, not cash when setting up our account. In the past, we've had some onboard credit already in our account, and we've had very little for a balance at the end of our cruise. We don't tend to buy anything on the ship except for an occasional photo or something that we may see in a gift shop. We don't buy drinks, pay for specialty restaurants or buy from the coffee shop, so our OBC is generally enough for us. Gratuities and excursions are paid for before we cruise.

Being single, and travelling on NCL, I will initially use my debit card. When on board, go to the Cruise Next desk, and deposit $500.00 on a future cruise, and they give you $250 OBC credit. As I'm on a B2B, I'll do the same the second week. As a result, I'll have a $1,000 credit towards future cruises, and a total of $500 free for my OBC expenses.

We prepay what we can, then use our credit card. There are different ways of looking at this and whatever you are comfortable doing is what you should do. We check our statement regularly to make sure that there are no surprises on disembarkation day. .

You are welcome!! Welcome to the forums. Stick around and have some fun with us :)

Thanks everyone for your reply. I have cruised twice before using credit card for onboard account, didn't have any problems (prepaid as much as I could). I only recently joined several cruising sites and was seeing this advice given and wanted to understand if I was missing out on something.

First cruise was 4 night, second a 5 night. Hubby and I decided to take a 7 night on Ncl Escape for our 25th anniversary and so I have been doing a lot more research than I had previously done and the cash vs credit advice had me baffled

so, I will say again thanks everyone for your replies 🥂🛳🎉

We have friends that have spent enough money at the art auctions they got a "free" cruise with a special art auction presentation. Some of the modern artists were there!

I sat through an art auction once on a cruise out of curiosity. Naively thought everything would be under a Grand. LOL! Silly me.

I am EXACTLY like DVCruise (she is smart!). Prepay all, cash on cruise account, and I know my available limits.

Now if I could just stay away from the art auctions.....