It’s How You Approach It — Part II of II

Beginning in last week’s blog, I discussed my thought processes for using a fairly large food comp intelligently. If you didn’t catch the start of this discussion, it’s available a few clicks away.

The next question was whether the $250 could be spent anywhere other than in a restaurant? Maybe a gift shop, spa, gaming, or whatever?

Yes, it could be spent at the gift shop — but the gift shop had very modest offerings. Still, at the end of our stay if it comes down to “spend it or lose it,” Bonnie might well decide that one of the purses wasn’t too bad. Or maybe she could get something there as a gift. Bottles of alcohol would have been okay. Yes, the cruise ship would lock them up for the duration of the cruise (they want you to pay shipboard prices for your booze), but we’d get the bottles back. As it turned out, bottles of alcohol were not sold at the gift shop.

Next, while dining at Slack’s, was it possible to buy a bottle of wine without having it opened? Bottles that have been opened will be confiscated by the cruise ship and not returned. Some restaurants will leave the bottle totally unopened for you. Many won’t. Sometimes a small tip will get them to bend the rules for you. (And it’s easy to over-tip here. A bottle you can buy for $20 in a liquor store might well sell for $60 in a casino restaurant. Tipping $10 might make sense if it were really worth $60, but that’s a huge tip for something worth only $20.) You don’t know until you ask.

And I certainly wouldn’t ask at the start of the first meal. When restaurant employees are dealing with strangers, they are more likely to follow the rules to the letter. But on the first night, if we spend five minutes talking to the manager about the various places on Cape Cod that would be good for a day trip the next day, and came back the second night thanking him profusely and telling him how his advice really made our trip, we then are no longer strangers. We are “friends.” And sometimes people do favors for their friends.

(I’m actually writing this after our first night at the restaurant and before the second. I have no idea how the conversation will go and it’s better to leave some things unsaid. This is more about the methodology of how I address this situation than it is about whether I was successful at getting an unopened bottle of wine this particular time.)

(A side issue that interests me is when cruise ships confiscate alcohol while you are boarding for a 7-day cruise is that they typically return it to you on the evening of the night before you disembark. For passengers who are remaining on the ship for 14 or 21 days, do they still give it back to you on the night before the first 7-day cruise is over? Or is their system sophisticated enough to keep it until the very last night of your multi-week cruise?

I’ve decided that if I don’t get the unopened bottle from Slack’s, I’ll stop at a liquor store and buy a bottle of wine to take on the ship as an experiment — because we’re no strangers to back-to-back cruises. It’ll be nice information as to whether we are able to enjoy our wine onboard during our second week aboard the ship in these situations.
Another option, whether we’re back-to-back or not, is to buy a bottle of wine off the ship and pay the $7.50 corkage fee. A $12 bottle of wine on land costs $30 on board. Paying the corkage fee is the better choice.)

I was interested in whether comp dollars could be used to buy free play in the casino. I was told that none of the $250 could be used for that, but any additional comp dollars I had can be redeemed for play-it-through-at-least-once free play at a 2-for-1 rate. That is, I could redeem up to $1,000 comp dollars a day for $500 free play. Playing a 99% game, this has an EV of $495 (with some variance). Would I rather have $1,000 in future meals at the M or $495 in cash? This is not an option available (so far as I know) in Las Vegas at either the M or the Tropicana, which are the two Penn National properties there.

I really didn’t know which was worth more to me, but I decided to exchange $1,000 worth of comp dollars for $500 in free play. On another day, I might have decided to keep all my comp dollars.

(The $1,000 in comp dollars I redeemed had nothing to do with the $250 in spend-it-or-lose-it comp dollars I was given as part of my Icon rewards. But they both happened on the same trip at the same place, so I decided to discuss them in the same article.)

Finally, we could let part of the $250 go unredeemed. It’s not the worst thing in the world. We are neither starving nor destitute. It goes against my grain to leave benefits on the table, but sometimes you have to. Sometimes you do this for strategic reasons. This time we’d do it because there was nothing we could get that we really wanted.