OK, so this is specifically about the cruise itself, what I paid for, and what I got.
Quick background: this was my eight cruise and third on Carnival. Carnival is the lowest-end cruise line I’ve been on and I’ve jokingly called it ‘the tackiest cruise line’. This ship and cruise wasn’t particularly tacky (no wet t-shirt contests that I was aware of) and in retrospect, I realize that the ship itself was classier because it wasn’t actually designed or outfitted for Carnival initially.
I was cruising alone (first time) and chose what I thought was a medium-level room/experience.
The Stateroom
Disclaimer: I can be somewhat spendthrift, I have financial resources, and I wasn’t particularly trying to save money at the expense of comfort. I could have gotten a much cheaper base ticket if I had bought it way ahead of time, or gone for an interior (no windows) stateroom, or even just an outside windowed stateroom. But I knew from past experience that having a balcony is a really lovely thing on a cruise ship, so I got pretty much the least expensive balcony stateroom (I allowed the cruise line to pick the stateroom itself, I just picked the category). So for that stateroom and the base price of everything else you get on ship (food, entertainment, facilities), I paid about $2,200, which works out to about $550 a day. I thought this was reasonable for what I got, particularly since I was paying a supplement for a two-person room (this ship doesn’t have single-person staterooms).
I was really happy with the room and the room service.
I think it would have been really tight for two or more people, but for one person, it was a great size. I had a king-size bed, my own bathroom, several closets, a desk, hooks on the wall by the door. Actually, the only thing about the room itself I didn’t like is there were no plugs by the head of the bed. (actually, there were, but they were all filled) I sleep with a CPAP machine, and ended up having to string the cord across the room to the desk to plug it in. If I’d woken up in the middle of the night tipsy or such (heaven forfend), I could have tripped and gone flying. But that was on me, putting up with that. If I’d been super-worried, I could have rearranged things, or brought a small extension cord – which maybe I’ll do on my next trips as a matter of course.
There was a mini-fridge (which I never used) and they also supplied two large bottles of water, which you had to pay for if you used.
My room attendant was Bernil. He was very nice and the room always got turned over as needed. And I called for room service every morning when I got up (coffee and juice) and it always showed up in about five minutes. So… room and service, great, no issues, nice job.
Facilities
The ship itself was perfectly nice. It’s a pretty new ship and nothing looked run-down. As I said above, I’ve been on some spectacularly tacky Carnival ships in terms of decor, and this was subdued and pretty nice. It’s an Italian-themed ship and while I didn’t take that seriously, I found it pleasing.
The elevators were of the type where you use an electronic UI to tell the bank what floor you’re going to, and it assigns you an elevator. (so you never push a button while on the elevator itself) This was a disaster during onboarding, when everyone was trying to use the elevators at once, but worked just fine normally. (I wish there had been indicators of where each elevator actually was, so you could have some feedback about how long you’d be waiting.)
One thing I found physically frustrating was that on deck 3 (lobby and services forward, restaurant aft) had no way to get from fore to aft. You had to go up to another deck, cross over and go down again. The obvious choice was deck 4, but that meant walking through the amazingly smelly casino – deck 5 was far nicer and you could also walk outside if you wanted to. But that was kind of a constant annoyance.
The outside decks were nice! Both pools (mid-ship and aft) were quite small. On one of my swims, I found myself dodging some floating hair from some previous passenger, that was disgusting. But I actually appreciated that they had staff lifeguards at the pools to tell kids to stop doing stupid things. They also made kids wear floatie vests, which makes sense.
They had some nice shady sitting areas on the outside desk port and starboard, but (I realized with dismay) they were mostly smoking areas. Ugh.
I don’t sunbathe, so didn’t have to worry about people reserving deck chairs and so on. They had a lot of fun stuff on deck which I appreciated without using – a basketball court, a water play park for the kids, hot tubs, a putt-putt golf course, ropes course, water slides. They also have an ‘adults-only’ area at the very top of the ship, which I didn’t remember existed until day #3.
I’ll get to food and drink later but of course they had bars all over the place of various sorts. I missed a feature of some other cruise ships – a ‘crows-nest’ lounge looking out on the bow. I mostly hung out at the piano bar and the central atrium bar for my cocktails.
Wifi: I think there’s a base level of wifi you get regardless so you can use the ship app, but you have to pay for more service than that and I’d splurged for the highest level. (for me, I knew it would be annoying to constantly battle download speeds, etc.) That worked great except they only allowed you to connect one device at a time, so every time I switched from my phone to my Ipad or whatever, I had to go through a routine to reconnect. That was a mild irritant.
Food and Drink
For the price of your ticket, this is what you get: access to “The Marketplace”, the cafeteria that all cruise ships have on the pool deck, various substations also close to the pool that have burgers, tacos, pizza, that sort of thing. “Free” drinks are just water, coffee, tea, juice. And then the main restaurant(s), where you have sit-down waiter-served meals. You can enjoy all of these without spending one extra penny.
Then they have specialty restaurants, where you pay a per-head surcharge (like $42). This ship has a steakhouse, an Italian restaurant and a Japanese restaurant. There are also smaller venues that charge you a la carte – there was a sushi restaurant (which I never got around to trying), a fancy coffee place where I got a mocha once, a ‘seafood shack’ (fried clams and stuff).
Sodas and alcohol are all extra, paid for as you go. You have the option of buying an ‘unlimited bubbles’ package, which gets you as much soda as you want (I did that, and it was worth it), and/or an unlimited drinks package for alcohol, which I didn’t do.
Quick review of beverages: they were all fine. The basic coffee was adequate without being excellent. The cappuccinos were really nice. All the cocktails were really good, and the only drink I had where I screamed at the price was a pina colada. They have a nice setup re: bottles of wine – if you buy one at the restaurant and don’t finish it, you can either take it with you to your room (mini fridge!) or just leave it at the restaurant. They’ll stow it away for you and bring it out the next time you ask for it. (My bottle lasted me three dinners, and it was a really nice white for a good price.)
I will say that the first morning, I ordered room service of coffee and juice and water. The ice water they served was awful. I don’t know where they poured it from. But the flat water in the dispensers in the cafeteria and that they poured at the restaurant was fine. I just stopped ordering water with the morning room service.
The food at The Marketplace was as expected – cafeteria food. Lots of variety. I didn’t eat there for a meal more than a couple of times. The burger bar (Guy Fieri-designed) was excellent, had a couple of those. The ‘La Strada’ sandwich stand on deck 5 was disappointing. The pizza was great for what it was. I never tried the tacos or the sushi or the seafood shack.
The main restaurant(s) – part of your pre-cruise prep is you have to pick a dining time option – either a set time every night or a ‘dine anytime’ option. I’d been confused for the first couple of days because in addition to the main two-floor restaurant at the aft of the ship that all cruise ships have, there was a midships restaurant called “Marco Polo” by the atrium lobby. It didn’t seem to be a specialty restaurant – and after a bit of research, I realized that it was exactly the same menu and thing as the main restaurant, they just used it for the diners who had set times.
For those of us who liked ‘dine anytime’, the ship app allowed you to ‘request a table’ when you were ready to go. Of course, then there was a wait, but you could do anything you want until the app told you the table was ready, and then you headed to the restaurant. Sometimes the wait was 10 minutes, sometimes it was 70, and for one morning’s breakfast, everyone’s app told them it was 10 minutes, but it was more like 45. But the basic idea was sound and I was happy with it when it worked. I was also grateful that they made no attempt to seat me, a single diner, at a table with anyone else – although there was an option to allow them to do that if I’d wanted to (no, ick). I was happy to dine alone and read my kindle, although I also often ended up in conversation with the people at the next table.
The food at the restaurant was always ‘fine’. I thought the portions were small, but at the same time, that was good because of course, like everyone, I’d been nibbling my way through the day. I will say that it always seemed like the plate hit your table about ten minutes after it probably should have – everything was lukewarm rather than hot. But it all tasted good. Some breakfasts I had there – huevos rancheros, lobster benedict (with an upcharge) – those were both really nice. I just had scrambled eggs the day we got off the ship and those were awful, but the other sides were nice. The pastries were good. For dinner, I had things like mushroom soup, shrimp szechuan, salmon, steak – and these were all nice – and desserts like panna cotta. In the main restaurant, you had the option to upcharge to a steakhouse steak and some other options like that, and I thought about it, but didn’t.
The service in the restaurant was mostly lackluster, but it depended on your server. Sometimes they had QR codes on the table to look up the menu, and sometimes they didn’t – and twice I got asked what I wanted to order without having been handed a menu first. I kind of expect basics like ‘when a plate’s finished, make it go away with a quickness’ and that didn’t happen much. Water glasses went unfilled for long periods of time. Bottom line: it wasn’t bad, but the whole basic restaurant experience was about a notch below what I’d consider “fine”.
I hadn’t planned to dine at a specialty restaurant, and thought I’d missed my window to make a reservation, but it turned out I had no problem booking a table at the Italian place for the last evening. That meal was quite good, although I ordered poorly and kind of ended up with two salads for the first two courses. (one of these was an octopus appetizer and the octopus was overcooked) The pasta dish with rib meat was excellent, and so was the dessert. I had a glass of red with all this and it was really good. Service was very good, although I was chatting a lot with the table next to me and the server had no fear of interrupting, that’s for sure.
Entertainment and Excursions
The music around the ship varied. The very first evening, I went swimming around 6:00 and then my room card got lost (ack!) and I found myself in line at Guest Services dripping into my towel. (and they didn’t yell at me and I got a new card quite quickly once I got up to the counter). But during that wait in (a long) line, I was subjected to the atrium’s live music which was overly loud and pretty awful.
However, I had drinks in the atrium a couple of other nights and the guy who played guitar and sang was really good, I liked that a lot.
I spent a couple of evenings having a pre-dinner cocktail at the piano bar, and I very much enjoyed the stylings of Francisco, the pianist, who played Billy Joel and Elton John and stuff like that.
I went to Macio’s “18+” comedy show one night and that was a hoot.
I did trivia once (“Broadway”) and won! I did think it hilarious that, although this was not a gay cruise – and I was one of the small minority of gay passengers on board – all the trivia categories were super-gay, like “Golden Girls” and “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and “Will & Grace”.
I did ‘stretches’ out on the mid pool deck one morning. I was late and I thought the stretching was a bit beyond me, so I skipped it after that. That guy also did an abs workout later. So that was nice to at least have as an option.
I only spent a little time in the casino. I found some of the slot machines confusing and could not figure out what you were supposed to do with them. I started with a $20 nut and at some point lost the whole thing in one swoop, and stopped there. As I said, the casino was smelly because of smoking, but they had a side room which was non-smoking, so that was thoughtful.
Is shopping entertainment? They had a Carnival-branded store, where I bought a (too expensive) shoulder bag because I’d forgotten to pack one. And high-end stores. I did end up buying a pricey watch at the sale, 75% off. I though the price I ended up paying for it was reasonable, the marked price was ridiculous. There was some jewelry I wouldn’t have minded buying if it cost about a third of what it cost. (the salesperson did everything he could to bring the price down, but it was still Too Much)
We only had one port (Bermuda) and I had my own plan, so didn’t do any of the cruise-offered excursions. I will say that getting off and on the ship was easier than I’ve seen it on other cruises.
Tipping
Tipping is always an issue on a cruise – how much do you tip? Who do you tip? Like any tip, you don’t actually have to tip, but not tipping is rude. I’d signed up for the prepaid gratuities package, so I knew some of my tipping was already covered. But I was confused as I went through the cruise, because checks for upcharges and drinks and such came with an 18% gratuity added, and also had a spot for further tipping. So I just ‘winged it’, but when I came back, I looked at it a little more closely and it turned out I’d pretty much done it right.
- The ‘prepaid gratuities’ covered everything you got that you’d already paid for in your ticket – your cabin attendant, the restaurant meals and so on.
- The upcharges and drinks and stuff did have that 18% already there, so you didn’t have to add more, that’s still a good tip. I still did sometimes.
- The sodas I got on my “bubbles” plan and the room service of coffee and juice all had checks presented to me of “$0.00”. To these, I usually tipped a buck or so.
Embarkation and Debarkation
Getting on was pretty easy – you pre-booked a boarding time slot, and then when you got there, you handed over your tagged baggage to the porters, and then went through a process of different stations, which all moved pretty quickly, until you got on the boat. I anticipated at some point they’d give you your Sail & Sign card, which is how you pay for things and get into your room, but no, I just found myself in the atrium without a clear idea of what to do next. It turned out that what they wanted you to do was go to a specific ‘muster station’ and get a safety briefing, and I was happy to do that, but they behaved like I should already know that and that was the first I’d heard of it. And you got your sail/sign card when they opened the room corridors at 1:30, and it was in your door.
There was a lot of planning around debarkation. You had the option of either putting your checked bag out in the hall the night before, or schlepping all your luggage yourself, which gave you more flexibility about when to leave. But you also had to sign up for a time slot to leave and somehow I missed that part, and the app was wonky for me the last day, so I never did sign up for one. Also, the booking for breakfast for the restaurant the morning of the debarkation briefing (our last day at sea) was all screwed up and I ate too late to make it to the briefing.
No big deal, I did in fact make it off the ship with my luggage in time to get home for my first meeting of the day. I did find it confusing re cabs/public transportation when I got out of the cruise terminal – you had to cross the street to get a cab, and it was just unclear – I ended up walking east one block to 11th Avenue to get out of the crush of people, and summoning an Uber, which worked fine.
I will say being able to take a cruise right out of Manhattan, rather than having to fly to Miami or whatever, is really convenient. I know some lines go out of Brooklyn – that would probably be really easy for me as well. (There’s also Bayonne, but that would be a gigantic pain from Queens.)
So… bottom line, I had a really good experience and would do it again. I will say that the biggest thumbs-down was the restaurant experience, and suspect that the solution to that is to go with a different cruise line next time. Everything you get with your base ticket should be at least ‘fine’, and then you can splurge on the special experiences as you go.
The Toast Point Page 