Beware... Arcade Credit is a SeaPass Scam/Rip-Off
We did our first Royal Caribbean Cruise in the spring on Icon and as part of our pre-purchases I took advantage of the $100 arcade credit for $75, knowing my kids would see it and want to play. Sure, $100 for $75, sounds great. Wrong.
Turns out, the credit applies to only one SeaPass card, mine. I mistakenly assumed any of our four cards would make use of the credit. It never crossed my mind that I would need to give my SeaPass card to my kids any time they want to go to the Arcade? Not only is that risky, in them losing my card, but it leaves me without my SeaPass card while they're in the arcade.
After our seven-day cruise, I get the folio and it has $85 in extra charges from the various SeaPass cards in my family from the arcade. I email them and they refuse, twice, to give any kind of refund. It's absurd to me because we only charged $85 in seven days, so we're not trying to scam Royal Caribbean or get a free lunch. We honestly just used the arcade a little bit, in line with our credit. And we didn't come close to using up the actual $100 credit on my actual SeaPass card, since we only used it about one-fourth of the time between a family of four.
They wouldn't even give a refund of the difference of my actual remaining arcade credit and the $85. I thought, okay, "My fault, I didn't think to check the rules, you got me. But at least refund from the $85 in charges from what we didn't use from the arcade credit. Isn't that fair and a gesture of goodwill toward a customer?" Nope, denied. That's just corporate greed.
I know it's not much comparing the total cost of the cruise, but wow. For them to not even give me any kind of refund at all. It left a very bad taste in my mouth for Royal Caribbean given how much we spent on the cruise overall.
On top of all this, the arcade was very average and quite small. Those charges that made up the $85 were $2 and $3 charges per-game. We didn't even play that many games. The self-service ticket prize machine was excruciatingly slow and had run out of any good prizes (not that we had enough tickets for them). And lastly, we found it lame that the Playmakers sports bar's games like basketball and air hockey don't accept the arcade credit. It's literally just for the actual arcade and no other "arcade" games you find elsewhere. Nickel and diming all the way.