WHY I WROTE THE CASINO-COMP CRUISING EBOOK
I wish I had found a book like this 25 years ago.
I wish I had known then what I know now.
I wish I had understood that casino comps were not only for high rollers or people gambling thousands and thousands of dollars.
And I wish I had understood how much travel value could come from simply knowing how the system worked.
Because I did try to learn.
I researched.
I read Facebook posts.
I joined Facebook groups.
I watched videos.
It wasn't that I couldn't find some information. The problem was that the information was scattered all over the place.
One video would explain one part.
Another video would explain something else.
A Facebook post might answer one question but create three more.
You could probably watch a hundred videos trying to put all the pieces together.
And even then, until you actually do it yourself, you do not really understand how it works.
That was certainly true for me.
And I was not coming at this as a gambler.
I grew up in a town that now has two casinos. I had access to casinos for years. But when I went, it was usually to eat, see a free show, or maybe play a few dollars’ worth of quarters and then walk away.
Quite frankly, I did not have the money to do much more than that anyway.
I never in a million years thought I could walk into a casino on a cruise ship, play modestly, and eventually end up with comped cruise cabins.
That absolutely blew my mind.
And the funny thing is, we did not start from scratch.
We were already cruising.
Our DIY Around-the-World Year had already been planned.
We already had the cruises. We already had the itinerary. We already knew we were going to spend a huge amount of time at sea.
Between 2025 and 2026, we already had 101 nights of paid cruising on our calendar.
Our schedule was full.
So instead of creating an entirely different travel plan just to chase casino comps, we used the cruises we were already taking as our opportunity to learn.
Those cruises became our classroom.
We experimented.
We watched what happened.
We learned how the points worked.
We learned what kinds of offers followed.
We learned what seemed to matter and what did not.
We learned what worked for us and what did not.
And eventually, those 101 nights of paid cruising helped lead to another 82 nights of comped cruising.
Our DIY Around-the-World Year turned into something so much more than we could have imagined.
We thought we were simply taking the trips we had already planned.
Instead, those cruises became the place where we learned how casino comps actually worked for us.
We were not booking cruises just to gamble.
We were using the cruises we had already chosen to learn, experiment, and see what happened.
And what happened changed the way we travel.
That is really the part that changed everything for me.
We did not say, “Let’s start gambling so we can cruise.”
We were already cruising.
We simply started asking, “What happens if we learn how this works while we are already here?”
And that became the system that worked for us.
But the book itself came later.
While we were cruising, I was not thinking about writing a book.
I was not sitting on ships outlining chapters.
I was not turning our experiences into a manuscript while we were at sea.
We were simply living it.
Cruising.
Learning.
Experimenting.
Watching what happened.
Figuring out what worked for us.
The idea for the book did not come until much later, when our pace finally slowed down.
Now we are on a 2.5 month house sit.
We have quiet.
I have time.
Our experimental year is pretty much over, and life is moving at a completely different pace.
I recalled when we were cruising, sharing this information with anyone who cared to listen.
Folks seemed as open to the concept of comped cruising just as much as we had been for years, but never understood the concept.
That is when I started looking back at everything we had learned and realized how scattered the information had been when I was trying to understand it myself.
I had watched videos.
Read Facebook posts.
Joined groups.
Done the research.
But the details were everywhere.
And that was when I thought:
This really should all be put together in one place.
Not as a rigid formula.
Not as a promise that everyone will get the same results.
Not as a book that says, “Do exactly what we did and this will happen to you.”
Because this is not really a how-to book.
It is our story.
What we tried.
What we learned.
What worked for us.
What surprised us.
What I wish somebody had explained to me years ago.
And now I finally had the time to sit down and put it all together.
I could not have written this book while we were living that year.
I did not have the time.
And I probably did not have enough distance from it yet either.
I needed to live the story first.
Then I needed the quiet to understand what the story actually was.
Now I have the time to tell it.
And maybe that is the biggest reason the book exists at all.
I wanted the details I had struggled to piece together.
I wanted the explanations I wish I had found sooner.
I wanted the kind of clarity that would have made the whole thing easier for me to understand when I was starting out.
I wrote this book for the people who are where I used to be.
The people who do not know.
The people who are curious.
The people who want to know.
The people who are thinking, “There has to be more to this than I understand.”
Because that was me.
And if I had had this book 25 years ago, I would have devoured it.
So I decided to write the one I wish I had.
There’s always a story.
No comments:
Post a Comment