Manufactured spending creates mileage-earning opportunities by putting spend on a credit card and then paying that bill off — effectively earning points for buying virtually nothing. Having just completed a cruise on Holland America, I discovered that the casino on the ship does not charge a fee to buy chips: they charge the amount straight to your room, which ultimately gets charged to your points-earning credit card. Most other cruise lines charge a fee to do this, but the Holland America Veendam did not.
How it works
You walk up to the blackjack table and ask for chips — say, $500 worth. You sign the slip and $500 gets charged to your cabin, which then hits your credit card statement. If you choose not to gamble, you can immediately cash the chips back in. Do that once a day on a 10-day cruise and you’ve run $5,000 through your card for basically nothing, plus whatever the card’s multiplier is on that spend (charging a cruise to the Chase Sapphire Reserve, for example, codes as travel and earns 3x). Just make sure to pay the credit card bill in full with the cash you accumulated — and don’t carry $5,000 in cash around the ship unnecessarily.
Check before you start
This depends entirely on the specific ship and cruise line — some casinos charge a fee to convert room charges into chips, which erases the value immediately. Ask at the casino cage what the fee is, if any, before you commit any real money.
The real risk to understand
Card issuers can treat gambling-related transactions differently from an ordinary purchase — in some cases as a cash advance, which typically carries its own fee, a higher interest rate, and no grace period, on top of earning no rewards at all. Ask the casino how the charge will be coded before you buy chips, and know your own card’s terms around gambling and cash-equivalent transactions so you don’t end up paying more in fees and interest than you earn in points.
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