Royal Caribbean made two announcements during its earnings call last week that I think are really important for anybody who was a Royal Caribbean fan to be paying attention to, especially the first thing, which is a big change to how you earn points on Real Caribbean.

Today, when you go on a Real Caribbean cruise, you earn points for Real Caribbean's Crown and Anchor Society.

But if you went on Celebrity Cruises or Silver Sea, which are companies that Real Caribbean owns, you would earn points towards those particular loyalty

programs.

But that's going to change because in early 2026, we don't know when, Royal Caribbean will allow you

to go on other cruises like Silver Sea or Celebrity.

I think Celebrity is probably the bigger deal here because I think it's more likely for

most people to go on.

And you're going to be able to earn points on those sailings towards your preferred loyalty program, which I'm going to

assume is crowd and anchor society. The advantage for this, the reason why this matters is now you can

go on celebrity creases or silver sea cruises and still earn your status towards Royal Caribbean.

A lot of people, including myself for a long time, said, you know what, I really want to try to, you know, get my status up in Royal Caribbean. I want to get to Diamond. I'll get a Diamond Plus, Pinnacle, whatever. And so it kind of forces your hand to stay loyal to Royal in a sense, in the sense that you should only be cruising on Royal Caribbean. But there are a lot of other cruises out there, obviously, because Silver Sea and

celebrity go to a variety of places rural Caribbean doesn't have. They also have a different vibe to their cruises. You know, some people might say, well, for one thing, it's definitely more adult-leaning, not saying that it's an adult-only cruise line, it's not. But obviously there are less kids on celebrity and there are very few kids on Silver C.

Partially because of the pricing differences,

partially because of the approach to cruising. And we've talked about, you know, what it's like

to go on other cruise lines and previous podcast episodes and articles. You can read all that. But

this is a really big deal. And this is something Roller K real Herman's been talking about for a while and working towards of improving its loyalty benefits.

I mean, there's a lot more that they could be doing. And we'll get to that in a second. But this is a

major first step. And as someone who admittedly is pretty leery of any change to loyalty programs,

I'm always like, I understand that we all want better, but I always fear about tinkering with what's working, whether it's how good it is or not a different story, but tinkering with it causes unforeseen problems and ends up making it worse, so to speak.

Anyway, I really think at least at the onset of this, but little information we do have about

it, looks to be pretty darn good. Now, we don't know the full information yet. Real

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