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

I earn a number of “free” cruises for play at various casinos. One casino where this happens is the M Resort in Las Vegas. Icon members ($800,000 video poker coin-in per calendar six months), earn one 7-day Norwegian Cruise Line balcony cabin cruise for two people per six-month period — plus periodically they have extra cruise giveaways as well. Any cruises I earn from Caesars Entertainment are also on NCL.

In addition, Icon members receive $500 annually towards travel to get to their cruise and a 2-day trip to any Penn National resort including $250 in food credit. These are actually two separate benefits, but you can use them on the same trip.

Since Bonnie and I enjoy dancing and relaxing, cruises are pleasant vacations — and we’ve been to all the ports. Once or twice each year, we have enough offers for cruising two or three weeks in a row, but one of the concerns is getting to the cruise locations inexpensively. All the credit card discounts talked about by Jimmy Jazz or Eric Rosenthal are in play, of course, but an extra $500 off is always welcome.

As it happens, Plainridge Park casino is a harness racing racino, part of the Penn National chain, and very near the Foxborough part of greater Boston. If we can find interesting cruises out of Boston, then part of our transportation expenses will evaporate.

For much of the year, they have 7-day Bermuda cruises out of Boston, where the ship docks in Bermuda for a few days and doesn’t move. You have 24-hour on-and-off privileges. It’s a different sort of cruising experience compared to having a ship arrive at a port at 8 a.m. and you must be back on board later that same day.

In the fall, they have “fall colors” cruises for seven days north out of Boston, along the New England coast, and then down the St. Lawrence River (a key part of the St. Lawrence Seaway) to Quebec City. The following week, the ship returns to Boston, stopping at primarily different ports. So, if you plan your dates right, you can have three consecutive weeks where there is a different itinerary each week. Plus, if you stay in the same stateroom, you have an extra day to explore Quebec City or the nearby countryside.

That’s what we did. The last week of the Bermuda cruise season was September 7-14 and the first week of the fall colors cruise was September 14-21, followed by the return to Boston on September 21-28. A key part of making this work for us was to start the “fall semester” of video poker classes at the South Point on July 3 which would allow us to finish up on September 4 and get on a plane to Boston on September 5.

I was certainly willing to play at Plainridge were the pay schedules are “interesting.” They didn’t have much video poker, but the best games were actually better than I expected. The loosest I found was $1 Triple Play 9/6 Double Double Bonus, which is worth a tick under 99%, and the machines were busy enough that I couldn’t do an exhaustive search. They had no table games.  And even though this 99% game is less attractive than I normally play, it was plenty good enough to play some — which I’ll discuss in next week’s blog.

There is no hotel associated with the casino, so they put us up at a nearby Holiday Inn Express. Acceptable. They have nicer places in the area, and if they believed we’d be big players at the casino I’m certain a higher-end hostelry could have been arranged. But we probably weren’t going to play that much, and this was fine.

Arriving at the casino at 7 p.m. on a Wednesday, Bonnie and I had $250 to spend food-wise before Friday 9 a.m., which is when we’d leave the area to travel back to Logan Airport from where we had a shuttle reservation to get to the ship. They have Slack’s, which is an oyster bar and grill restaurant, and Flutie’s, which is a sports pub. They also have a food court, but $250 is simply too much fast food for two people to consume in two days.

The first thing we had to figure out was whether we were able to use the $250 over more than one meal? Although there’s a wine list at Slack’s which would allow us to easily surpass the $250 threshold, the surf-and-turf special ran only $30 apiece — meaning that running a tab of $250 over two days for two people without a significant amount of alcohol would be difficult. Food “to go” was of little interest because we were just about to spend three weeks on all-you-can-eat cruises. Still, we had a refrigerator in the room, so having a bit leftover for “midnight snacks” wasn’t all bad.

Next, we needed to determine what would happen to any part of the $250 that wasn’t spent? Was it placed in my “comp dollar” account — meaning that maybe we could spend it back in Las Vegas or at other Penn National properties? If that was the case, the “How do you spend it all right now?” problem disappears.

I was told by the only host on property Wednesday night that this, however, was not the case. The money wouldn’t “evaporate,” but could only be spent at Plainridge Park. I would have liked to ask this same question to a more senior host, but there was nobody available.

There were more things to consider in how to spend these comp dollars, but I’ll leave the discussion for that until next week.