December 28, 2019|Cruise

Manufactured spending is creating mileage earning opportunities by spending on your credit card and then paying the credit card bill for purchasing virtually nothing. 

Having just completed a cruise on Holland America, I discovered that the casino on the ship does not charge a fee if you want money for gambling: they will give you chips and charge the amount 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 does not. 

So, for example, you walk up to the blackjack table and ask for $500 in chips.  You sign the slip and $500 gets charged to your cabin.  If you choose not to gamble, you can immediately go and cash out the chips for $500 cash.   Let’s say you do this every day on a 10 day cruise, you will have accumulated $5,000 in cash as well as $5,000 in credit card spend.  If you charge the cruise to your Chase Sapphire Reserve card, it will code as triple points, so you will earn 15,000 Ultimate Reward points for doing basically nothing.  Just make sure to pay your credit card bill in full with the cash you accumulated (and try not to get mugged while carrying the cash home!).

Additionally, if you have not received your annual $300 Chase Sapphire Reserve Travel Credit, the first $300 of your cruise spend will be credited back to your credit card account.