Transatlantic Cruising for "Free" to the Gold Coast

For years now, I've wanted to:

• Sail across the Atlantic.
• See Gibraltar.
• Visit Spain's Gold Coast.
• Travel by train across the interior.
• Visit Portugal's great cities.

In this trip, I do all of that over 26 days in a journey that involved:

• 17 different currencies,
• 5 hotel programs.
• 4 airlines.
• 5 banks.
• Several credit cards.

Normally, I would try to mix in pictures of the trip, but in this particular article, I'm going to focus on how I booked things, why I did what I did, the impact of the Key Bridge collapse, and how while this seems very complicated, it's really composed of very simple steps.

Currencies

• Cash: USD, CAN, EUR
• 5 Banks: Amex, Chase, CapitalOne? Citi? Schwab?
• 6 Hotel: Choice, Hilton, Hyatt, IHG, Marriott, Wyndham
• 4 Airlines: Aeroplan, American, Delta, United
• 1 Train: Renfe
• Private: Carnival Gift Cards, Cruise Cash, United Travel Bank

My cruise was Carnival Journeys transatlantic crossing aboard Legend, a 2,000 passenger Spirit class ship.

It was a 12-day cruise:

• Departing from Baltimore
• Ponta Delgada, Azores
• Straights of Gilbraltar
• Málaga, Spain
• Alicante, Spain
• Ending in Barcelona, Spain

All in, it costs about $200 in port fees and $200 in gratuities.

In spring of 2023, I parlayed Wyndham Diamond status into Caesar's Diamond and into a free transpacific cruise on Carnival. While taking that, I "gambled" enough to get additional free cruise offers, and this cruise used an offer for an inside cabin.

There are a lot of tricks to "gamble" on Carnival without losing money, but this is not a place to discuss that, and I would not recommend folks try this unless they really, really, really know what they are doing.

With these offers, you get the cabin for free but need to pay:

• Daily gratuity.
  $16 per day.
• Port fees and taxes.
  Varies: $40 per port day is typical, including embarkation and debarkation.

I like to use these offers on the longer, more adventurous, Carnival Journeys cruises whenever possible because they:

• Average roughly 33% lower cost per day.
  You pay a lot for port days and these ocean-crossing cruises have a higher proportion of sea days.
• Tend to use smaller 2,000 passenger ships sailing under capacity.
  Lines are 1/10th the length of 4,000+ passenger ships on shorter cruises.
• Save you money on trips to other continents.
  You only need to book a one way flight.

Since I'd wanted to visit Spain and Portugal, the Baltimore to Barcelona voyage was really a no-brainer, satisfying all my critera.

I always fly in business class or better.

When booking domestic flights, there are usually a few reasonable options for purchasing an award booking and a few for cash rates.

Award bookings:

• Book a domestic airline (AA, Delta, United, etc) with its own miles.
  Easier to find award availability, but miles are scarce and precious.
• Book a direct domestic airline flight with another airline's miles (Turkish, British Airways, etc).
  Hard to find award availability, but miles are plentiful.*

Cash rates:

• Pay cash.
  Nope.
• Pay a cash rate using airline credit.
  Several credit cards can give you United Travel Bank credit which works like an expiring gift card balance.
• Pay a cash rate with points on the Amex Portal.
  1.0 cent per point normally, 1.54cpp after a 35% rebate, if you have an Amex business platinum.

When you book with domestic airlines using miles, it's easy to get amazing value on partner flights, connecting itineraries, and relatively easy availability, even last minute. Plus domestic airlines have low fees and amazing free cancellation policies. The downside is it's hard to earn miles and they become very previous.

Given that I had a specific date and destination, and few direct flights, I guessed it would be hard to find domestic award availability through foreign airline partnerships (booking United via Turkish miles). These avenues tend to be a lot easier when you are very flexible.

A quick search in the Amex travel portal revealed a Delta business class flight for around $300. At 1.54 cents per point, that cost a little less than 20,000 Amex points and earned around $15 in Delta Skymiles. Delta also allows easy changes on these flights and that would turn out to be very important later.

For my flight to Baltimore, I had a lot of choices.

• Booking domestic flight with scarce domestic airline miles.
• Attempting to book a domestic flight with plentiful foreign airline miles.
• Paying cash.
• Paying a cash rate, via United Travel Bank.
• Paying a cash rate, with points, through the Amex travel portal.

The first three options work well when you either have lots of points or highly flexible dates. Paying cash is never desirable.

I booked Delta through the Amex travel portal, paying with Amex points at a rate of 1 cent per point.

Normally, this would be a mediocre redemption

When you pay with points through the Amex portal, each point covers 1 cent, a mediocre redemption at best. However, if you have the Amex Business Platinum, and if it's a premium fare or your preferred airline, you get a 35% rebate on your points. This makes it a much better $0.0154 per point redemption. In addition, because Amex pays the airline in cash, the airline sees it as a cash booking and this means you earn miles on your flight. This brings the redemption value closer to $0.016 or $0.017 depending on your earn rate with the airline, a 60-70% uplift and a fantastic way to book domestic flights.

Last I checked, the year was 2024, not 1924, so why not fly?

Well, I see three reasons.

First, sailing is cheap. A one way trip to Europe costs:

• $2400 flying business.
• $800 flying economy.
• $1,000 on a cruise with a normal deal.
• Under $400 with a casino offer.

Second, you can conveniently sample hard to reach places.

• The Azores are only accessible by boat or plane.
• Traveling along the Gold Coast is impossible except by road (bus/rental) or by sea.
  There are some small airports and terminal train lines from Madrid, but nothing coastal.

Third, it's a fun and romantic experience.

• There's something magical about a journey by sea, the building anticipation of traveling to another continent.
• Along the way, there will be shows, entertainment, fine dining, talks about astronomy.
• You get to experience things with other cruisers, trivia, excursions, a midnight gathering on the bow while passing through the Straights of Gibraltar.

Compared to flying, there's really no comparison.

• Cramped and uncomfortable, jammed into an aluminum tube for eight hours.
• Desperately trying to sleep, to block out everyone around you, and inevitably failing.
• Spending the first half of your trip jet-lagged from a 5+ hour time zone change.
• Sure it's fast, and you need less time off, but remote workers may find it easy to work while cruising.

Cruise ships have casinos and they are always looking for players. If you have casino status, you can often parlay that into a “free” cruise where the cabin is free, but you pay port fees, gratuities and any extras like wi-fi or drink packages. Getting additional free cruise offers will depend on activity at the casino.

On this particular cruise, I had an offer for a free inside cabin, but I'd need to pay approximately $200 in port fees and $16 per day in gratuities.

Two factors make these offers perfect for ocean crossings.

First, port fees don't scale with sailing duration. These two itineraries have the same number of ports and may both cost $200 in fees despite the second cruise being twice as long and visiting considerably more interesting locations.

• 6 days: Miami, Nassau, Princess Cays, Freeport, Miami
• 12 days: Miami, Ponta Delgada, Málaga, Alicante, Barcelona.

Second, if you're sailing to a destination, instead of in a loop, you can combine trips and save money on airfare because the ship takes you where you want to go. Instead of booking round trip flights to Europe, you just need one way.

I chose to sail on the Spirit class Carnival Legend for two reasons.

First, Spirit class ships are small, around 2,000 passengers, and ocean crossings tend to have fewer families and more single occupancy cabins. This means there are no crowds and rarely any lines. You can do what you want when you want without waiting.

Architecturally, I find these ships have more open spaces and those spaces work better, flowing into each other without needing to be cordoned off into totally separate areas. You can walk through a lounge and discover that the piano bar pianist is amazing without needing to consciously decide to go into the piano bar. I've sailed on the 4,000 passenger Venezia before, and it was constant crowds with some lines being 20 minutes long.

Second, a lot of older ships, like the Spirit class, have unusually good "inside" or "ocean view" cabins. For example, my inside cabin had floor to ceiling windows, the same footprint as a balcony door, but the view was obstructed by a lifeboat. This is still much nicer than having no window at all.

Together, this made the sailing from Baltimore to Barcelona an ideal choice.

Did I mention Baltimore? Well, two and a half weeks before sailing, the Key Bridge collapsed indefinitely closing the port of Baltimore. Fortunately for me, the Carnival Legend had left port about 24 hours earlier and within days Carnival HQ had developed a contingency plan to reroute Legend to Norfolk. In addition to giving all passengers a partial refund of port fees, Carnival also offered free bussing from Baltimore to Norfolk.

After the bridge collapsed, I was able to log into Delta.com and change my flight to go to Norfolk instead of Baltimore and all I had to do was pay the difference in cost ($25).

Baltimore is about 2.5x larger than Norfolk, and it has considerably more hotels, flights and infrastructure. Dumping an extra 2,000 tourists on a city that size can have a noticeable impact on the price of hotels, flights and award availability.

Before Carnival officially informed us of the change in departure port, they announced the change for the cruise prior to mine. At this point, it seemed pretty likely we were going to sail out of Norfolk, but it was far from certain, and no one knew initially how long the port of Baltimore would remain closed.

To hedge my bets, I immediately booked a fully refundable award flight with American and a room in the Wyndham Garden. The choice of program here is not accidental in that American is known for offering cheap, fully refundable award bookings close into flights. Likewise, Wyndham has a fixed award chart and so while prices at Marriott and Hilton were spiking for both cash and award bookings as demand surged, the Wyndham price remained a flat 15,000 points per night, and just 13,500 points for those of us with a Wyndham Business Earner credit card which grants a 10% discount on redemptions.

At the same time, I kept my hyatt reservation and Baltimore flight in place until we received a formal notification. Once the formal change was announced, I switched the Delta flight to Baltimore and cancelled with American and Hyatt.