Change in Gold and Platinum Castaway Club onboard shopping benefit. About This Page:

[CruiseCarol]

Just off the Dream.
I was really disappointed to see they changed the onboard shopping benefit for Gold and Platinum Castaway Club members. Now the discount for Gold and Platinum members is 10% discount. The discount does not apply to the shops on Castaway Cay. Just the main stores onboard.

Don’t get me wrong I really appreciate a discount but it is so much lower than the previous offer. Plus they gave no advance notice of the change.

[Colexis Mom]

Thanks for the info Carol!

[Dave Marx]

Thanks for the report! I've updated our Castaway Club Benefits thread.

At the beginning of the year the benefit was still a $25 on board credit for any shop purchase of $100 or more. Was that still in effect recently, or had there been another offer in between? Either way, DCL has always been vague about the shopping benefit.

Special Merchandise Offering
Take advantage of special onboard shopping opportunities.

For my spending practices, I prefer the 10% to the $25 OBC offer. A family can spend well over $100 during the course of the cruise and never qualify for the OBC at all, unless they were making big purchases or were disciplined about their shopping. Similarly, you could spend a few hundred dollars on a single collectible item and still just get $25 back. And if you didn't have reason to "shop big" (on a lot of cruises I'll buy little more than some pins), you never qualified at all. I'd rather get 10% every time I hit the cash register on all the little and big purchases.

[marisag]

Originally Posted by Dave Marx

At the beginning of the year the benefit was still a $25 on board credit for any shop purchase of $100 or more. Was that still in effect recently, or had there been another offer in between? Either way, DCL has always been vague about the shopping benefit.

When we asked at guest services after being a little upset about it, they said they just implemented it "A few months ago. Two or three."

[CruiseCarol]

I know I got the $25.00 off $100.00 in August on my Alaska cruise.

[chezp]

I'm surprised they didn't inform you guys, that seems wrong to me.

[Dave Marx]

Disney's idea of "newsworthy" and ours (agents, guidebook authors, etc.) isn't always the same. I put this on a par with changing a few items on a restaurant menu. They rarely say a word about that kind of thing, though there are exceptions, such as the new item at Remy they described in this past week's Disney Parks Blog.

They were intentionally vague about what the onboard shopping benefit would be from the git-go - saying just that we'd get special merchandise offers. Retailers tweak pricing and offers constantly, far more frequently than they announce sales and other promotions. This discount/credit is basically a spur to impulse purchasing, like an unadvertised mark-down in a store. If a particular offer isn't producing the desired results (shopping on board), roll out another one and see if it works any better. It doesn't seem like the kind of thing that would tip the "should I cruise or not" balance, so why not focus on announcing those things that might make a difference? Like The Boy Who Cried Wolf, there are limits to how often you can toss out press releases before they lose their effectiveness.

[queenofheartsfan]

Thanks for the info!

[marshmellow86]

At the end of Sept the Dream still have the $25 OBC for $100 purchases (on ship, did not apply to CC shops). I liked it, as we learned to pool our purchases together to be a $100 or more and/or broke large purchases up over multiple transactions.

10% is better than nothing, but I liked the $25 off $100 much better.

[MickeyWatch]

Thanks for the information. I will be a gold CC member on our next cruise and I didn't realize that I would receive any discount