In a recent video from one of the Brian Christopher Slots Cruises, Brian mentioned a woman whose money did not return to her card when cashing out. This triggered a question from a viewer who wondered:
I’m confused. I thought on cruise ships (unless not all) I thought you were saying when you pull the card out, the money goes with you. That’s why I was surprised when that lady said money was left in a machine. I hope if it was yours you got it back.
Gaby B.
When cashless gaming works flawlessly, money moves between your slot and your account without much difficulty. Of course, technology has its moments – touchscreens that are a bit fussy or misaligned, machines that momentarily don’t want to communicate with each other, and so on.
In the case of Carnival Cruise Line ships, hitting cash out by default will send the money back to your account, but there is the rare occasion where it doesn’t work. The same should happen when you remove your card, but again, on occasion it doesn’t work. We had a situation on one ship where once the cashout failed and the machine locked up, requiring a tech to help resolve the situation (which they did pretty quickly).
But sometimes it just doesn’t go back, the machine doesn’t lock up, and the credits remain on the machine. So the advice we have to players is to simply double check. In that way you don’t miss that your money hasn’t gone back to your account.
You can also get their app, which shows how much money you have in your bank, so you can verify all is as it should be.
This isn’t a Carnival-specific problem by the way. Brian has had the occasional issue sending money back to his Yaamava’ cashless gaming account too. There, because ticket printing is still pretty prevalent, it’s not as hard because you can just print a voucher and cash it in at the machine or cashier later.
But in both situations you can’t do that if you walk away before verifying there’s an issue, so be sure to stay nearby until you see it’s confirmed all is set.
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