Photo: Shelley Steinhorst / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Six raffle tickets, forty prizes, and my name wasn’t on a single one – fairly typical for me. I’m spectacularly bad at winning anything: tombola stalls seem to sense me coming and quietly run out of prizes, and I’ve bought the same Friday scratch card for four years running, winning £2 exactly once, which I promptly spent on another scratch card. So reading that there’s apparently a cruise ship where passengers can’t stop winning felt like hope mixed with mild personal offence.
That ship sits inside a bigger trend. UK cruising has quietly become one of travel’s biggest growth stories: Travel Weekly reported that UK and Ireland passengers took 2.54 million ocean cruises in 2025, up 7% on the previous record of 2.4 million set only the year before. That is a lot of buffets, a lot of deck quoits, and, it turns out, a lot of people having a noticeably better run at the casino tables than I manage back home.
The study behind the winning-ship claim, spotlighted by Freebets.com, mined thousands of Tripadvisor reviews for words like “lucky”, “winning” and “happy” to find which cruise ship casinos left guests feeling luckiest. It makes me want to compare notes with regulars on online slot sites back on dry land, because whatever these cruise passengers are doing, I’m clearly doing the opposite.
The Ships Everyone Seems To Win On
Princess Cruises’ Diamond Princess topped the list, with 17.1% of its Tripadvisor reviews mentioning luck, winning or happiness in the same breath as the ship’s casino. Royal Caribbean’s Wonder of the Seas came close behind on 15.6%, then Celebrity Cruises’ Infinity on 12.2%. Princess Cruises landed a second ship in the top five too – the Emerald Princess, on 10.1% – with Cunard’s Queen Elizabeth closing out the top tier on an even 10%.
Lower down the table, Big M Gaming’s river casino boats and Victory Casino Cruises actually racked up some of the highest raw counts of “lucky” mentions, but their percentages dropped because they get reviewed so much more often overall. P&O’s Azura, Windstar’s Wind Star and Oceania’s Riviera rounded out the top ten, each holding a respectable, if less headline-grabbing, share of happy gamblers.
Does A Bigger Casino Mean Better Odds?
The obvious theory is that more machines mean more chances to feel lucky. Wonder of the Seas carries Casino Royale, a Vegas-style room on deck four with around 456 slot machines and 27 gaming tables, according to Cruise Prodigy, on a ship that briefly held the title of the world’s largest before Icon of the Seas took over in 2024. Diamond Princess, by contrast, is a far smaller ship built back in 2004, which suggests scale alone doesn’t explain why its guests keep talking about their luck. Atmosphere, crowd, or plain timing seem to matter just as much as the size of the casino floor.
Reading all this, it’s hard not to feel faintly robbed. I’ve stood in bigger, flashier arcades than any of these ships and walked away with nothing but a headache and a fiver’s worth of 2p-machine winnings I fed straight back in. Meanwhile, somewhere on the Pacific, apparently, a couple from Ohio are three blackjack hands into the best week of their lives while I’m still queuing for raffle tickets I’ve never once won with.
Part of me wonders if this is a mood thing rather than a money thing. Someone nine nights into a cruise, three cocktails in, with someone else making the bed and cooking dinner, is always going to describe a modest win in rosier language than someone popping into a seafront arcade on a wet Tuesday in February. A tenner up on a cruise feels like a story worth telling in a TripAdvisor review. A tenner up in a supermarket car park arcade, less so.
Filed Under: One Day, Maybe
None of this has convinced me I’d suddenly turn lucky the moment I boarded a cruise ship, because that isn’t how luck works. It has, though, firmly planted a Princess Cruises holiday on my “one day” list, somewhere between the Amalfi Coast and the log cabin I keep saying I’ll book and never do. If you want to follow my actual progress on that list, my travel adventures live in one corner of this blog, usually alongside at least one disaster and a lot of complaining about airport queues.
Until then, I’ll keep buying the same Friday scratch card and losing with good grace, while, apparently, everyone else out at sea keeps winning.