- The Aussie dollar is at a five-year low, but there’s an easy way to beat the dive on Royal Caribbean.
- If you pre-purchase your onboard credit (OBC) you CAN make significant savings.
- For someone looking to spend AUD$5000 on a cruise, you can save $770 just by pre-purchasing your OBC.
The Aussie dollar has hit a five-year low, and that’s bad news for cruisers sailing on lines that charged in American dollars. But Royal Caribbean has come up with a smart plan so you can beat increasing prices and save a few hundred dollars off your final cruise bill.
The line has offered a flat rate for pre-purchasing onboard credit – AUD$1 will equal USD$0.667. At different times, dependent on the strength of our currency, it can be more or less favourable. The dollar was only worth USD$0.62 this week, so the line’s flat rate now offers significant savings.
You can easily pre-purchase onboard credit through your Royal Caribbean cruise planner.
While the Aussie dollar jumps up and down, Royal Caribbean always offers a flat rate for pre-purchasing onboard credit. This rate is that $1AUD = $0.667USD. At different times this rate may prove more or less favourable, but with the Australian dollar currently dipping, in this moment only being worth USD$0.62 that rate suddenly offers some significant savings.
If you don’t pre-purchase your onboard credit, then any money transferred to your cruise card onboard will automatically use the exchange rate offered by your bank. This is sometimes equal to the global exchange rate, but very often lower. Furthermore, these will register as international transactions which incur a transaction fee with most credit and debit cards.
For example, CommBank charges a 3.5% foreign transaction fee, which can be significant if you are purchasing large amounts of American dollars.
When you pre-purchase your onboard credit with Royal Caribbean, there are no transaction fees attached as they make the conversion for you and you pay in Australian dollars.
Furthermore, if you don’t spend everything you transferred onto your cruise card, it will be refunded without a fee. This is great as it reduces the risk of budgeting too much money and then being stuck with money left over on your card.
As another bonus, putting all the money on your card in one go makes it easier to budget and track your and your travel party’s spending throughout the cruise.
This provides a significant advantage in comparison to simply topping up your card onboard and making purchases as you go.
How much can you save?
If you are a family of four on a 10-day cruise, and you think you’ll spend a total of AUD$5000 onboard, here’s the difference between what it can cost you overall if you pre-book the credit versus if you only transfer across your cash once you’re onboard.
Under Royal Caribbean’s conversion rate, this comes out to USD$3335. This means that if you budget AUD$5000AUD, at the Royal Caribbean rate for OBC, it will work out roughly to USD$3335.
If we look at Commbank their current rate for the Australian dollar is just USD$0.5982. If you spend USD$3335 at that exchange rate, you’ll spend a total of AUD$5575.1.
Commbank, like many other Australian banks, also charges an international transaction fee. For Commbank this 3.5%. What this means is of that AUD$5575, another 3.5% will be added as a surcharge, equalling $5770.23 in total.
Summary: Royal Caribbean’s pre-load rate for USD is far superior to the real rate offered by Australian banks. This means that if you pre-purchase your credit you can make significant savings. As illustrated in the example above, for each USD$3000 spent onboard, you can save about AUD$700 by pre-loading your onboard credit.
Does this apply to Celebrity cruises as well?
You cannot pre purchase the OBC through your cruise planner. It has to be done over the phone.