S.A.

Please look carefully into the Carnival ships before you consider booking any cruise on their line.
Their ship Tropicale is the most awful ship I have ever been on. Everything from horrible food, to flooding cabins, to major construction going on-the kind that it should be put in drydock for. To the worst problem, very rude staff. If you consider all of this and still decide to book on carnival, if you have a problem, settle it before you leave the ship. Once you are off, carnival will not even acknowledge that you were ever on their ship. If these problems were only found by us, I would have never posted this message, but I have spoken with many past passengers that ran into the same problems. Carnival advertises that they are the largest cruise company in the world. What they should say is that they are the cheapest. It's well worth spending a little more to vacation on a real ship that you will look back and remember with a smile. If you are considering their cruise guarantee, forget it, we tried to use it and they would not let us speak to anyone in charge.
To all of you that think Carnival is wonderful, try another cruise line just once, it's worth the price.

Mary Ann Accardi

It must be terrible to finally go on vacation, and then encounter problems as you did. But,I have to say that I totally disagree with your opinion that people should stay away from Carnival. We are going on our third cruise in October, and I wouldn't go on any other line. We never had any problems. The crew, the food, the entertainment, etc, were all great. Our room was always clean, and we even got room service delivered within 10 minutes. Perhaps you should investigate the Carnival Web Site. There's a cruise opinion poll there. You will see that many agree with me. Again, I think you just had bad luck.Hope you don't mind me sticking my 2 cents in, but I really enjoyed cruising with Carnival.

Erin

Sorry to hear about your cruise. i've been on 10
cruises, 5 on Carnival ( the latest last March) and
5 on Norwegian. Bad cruises can happen any where at any time. Friends of mine got stuck for two days in the middle of the ocean on Disney. Overall, all of my experiences have been great- and I intend to take many more cruises.

The age of a ship is extrememly important- the older a ship is the more like to have problems. It's also important to check in the last refit of the ship. This is usually listed in the brochure. You are right about solving any problems while on board it's much easier at the time then it is later. Please try again- don't give up cruising. Good luck

Charlie

Mary Ann have you cruised with any other lines ? If not , try some thing other than Carnival , I think you'll be pleasently surprized . Hamburger is great until you try steak . Adios !

Donna

Thank you SA for your comments! Regardless of how wonderful the experiences of SOME of Carnival's customers, if your experience was horrible - it's the one that counts. Who wants to book a trip that might be fabulous, but might not? Consistency counts, no matter where you go or what you're paying for. Whenever a provider of services is not reliable, well - they're not reliable. And, worse, if they are not interested in repairing their deficiencies subsequent to your experience, why should anyone bother with them?

Debbie

I have to agree with S.A. I took a trip on the Tropicale also. This was a few years ago, but right after our cruise it was supposed to be going into dry dock to get ready for a different route (we took the one that went to Caracas, etc.) It was awful. Construction going on at all times, parts of the decks were closed off (and its a small ship to begin with). Try laying on the deck with suntan lotion on and having sawdust blown down on you from above! Not pleasant. But what really was awful was that I had convinced my friend to come cruise on Carnival because I had taken a cruise on the Holiday and it was the best vacation I ever had. So it was really embarassing to me when this vacation was so lousy. It wouldn't have been so bad, except Carnival refused to even do anything to keep in our good graces. I think I finally managed to get $100 bucks out of them so my friend and I "could have dinner on them." Gee, how generous. We spent over a couple grand on your cruise and WOW $100 for dinner. I think they also offered certificates for 20%25 off of - guess what - another Carnival cruise! And not only was that a laugh-the certificates expired in a year. So I think you're best bet is to make sure you get on a newer ship. The old ones seem to have problems. Cruising is fun and I wouldn't want to stop. This Tropicale was an awful experience, but I keep remembering what fun I had on the Holiday!

S.A.

Debbie: you think sawdust is bad? The entire ship was told to go out on deck for the evening to watch the lava flow as the ship went past. We sat there for hours. All of a sudden they deceided to blow out the stacks on the ship, which sent red hot embers all over the outer decks. The decks we were told to watch from. We were running for cover while red hot burning embers were landing all over us. We had burn holes and black marks all over our clothing. We allerted one of the staff, they sent up the HEAD WAITER from the dining room to check it out. He said "not to worry". Needless to say, they really didn't care that our clothes were burned and black. The next morning they had a crew out scrubing the decks to remove the black marks. No announcements were made to go inside, nothing was ever said about it. This was just a LITTLE problem compared to the other huge problems that we lived with for 10 days. it boils down to THEY JUST DIDN'T SEEM TO CARE WHAT THEY DID TO INCONVIENCE THEIR PASSENGERS. Unbelievable huh????

Mary Ann

I must say that this message you posted is becoming very interesting!! I wanted to add that I did not mean to defend Carnival. They should have recognized these problems and compensated for them. I know that I would feel the same way as you do if I had these experiences. Since most of us don't have the opportunity to travel often, and we all look forward to our vacations, they should be as close to perfect as possible. My reply was intended to state simply that we did not encounter any problems, and had a pleasurable time on both cruises with Carnival. I'm still going on Carnival in October. I'm a little nervous now, but I'll let you know how it goes!

J. Perez

Thanks for the warnings. Wow.

Lynn

S.A. - I responded on one of your other posts about Carnival and will reiterate that I also had a bad experience on my first cruise, which was Carnival. Very RUDE treatment by excursions office, poor luggage handling and treatment by workers on the dock, waiting in unnecessary lines, being solicited to buy drinks on the sun deck and in the lounges nearly every five minutes. I've been on four wonderful cruises since then. Anyway, to put this all in perspective, it seems that about 50 percent of the people who have responded to this post and others about Carnival have some complaints and warn others NOT to cruise on them. However, how many posts or criticisms have you seen about Princess? RCCL? Holland America? Norweigan? Not many, if any at all. Nearly 100 percent satisfaction on the other lines, but complaints abound for Carnival. This should be an indicator and warning to others--if there is a 50-50 chance that your vacation will be less than perfect after the cruise line already has your money, why take the chance on them? And it should reaffirm what you've experienced--no we're not Carnival bashers, just informed travelers passing the word along so others don't have similar incidents happen to them on a cruise. If there's a 50-50 chance you're going to get hit by a car crossing the road, would you cross anyway?

S.A.

I wanted to go back into this site to thank you all for much e-mail backing us up our warning!!

Debbi

folks, you get what you pay for!!!! I've been on
a dozen or so cruises- loved the Fantasy, the Sensation, the Destiny- however the Carnivale
(an older ship) was DISGUSTING!! it also cost
a mere 300 bucks for the trip. SO???
also loved the celebrity Zenith that ran over a grand for the trip.
the Norway flat out sucked it smelled awful, and the lowering of the tenders in each port was the most clatter I've ever witnessed. but hey- less than 500 bucks for a week and 3 different islands-
you get what you pay for- and you make the most of it!!

S.A.

I wish we only had paid a few hundred for our cruise. We trusted Carnival's FORMER reputation!!! WRONG! WRONG! Boy were we wrong! We have gone on some inexpensive cruises, and we have gone on some in excess of $8,000.00. This was what I would call a medium priced cruise. With all that went wrong, we still could have made the best of it, if CARNIVAL'S STAFF had not been so RUDE throughout the whole trip, and afterwards. I'm not talking one or two rude staff members, I'm talking 95%25 of the staff that we encountered. Even worse was the fact that CARNIVAL did not want to hear about it, and really didn't give a hoot what conditions their ship was sailing under. By the way, just where and on what line would you go on a weeks cruise for a few hundred dollars? I've never heard of one, anybody else?

Charlie

Hey Debbi I'm quite adept at "making do" on bargain cruises . If you could find a couple of $3oo & $500 week cruises for me I'd be forever grateful .I've cruised more than a dozen times myself and I'm always looking for a "good deal".

Rod Hoots

For all of you, I suggest spending some time on cruiseopinion.com. It provides hundreds of detailed opinions, submitted by passengers, on every major cruise ship. In addition, there are descriptions of the ships, cabins, etc. In regard to the Carnival line, it seems to be an age and temperament thing - if you're young and like to party, Carnival is for you. Also, after 27 cruises, I can assure you that in general you get what you pay for.

Donna

My husband and I have been on 5 cruises in the past 7 years. I have found that I much prefer the newer ships such as Majesty of the Seas, Zenith and Horizon. We also cruised on the older Starward and Meridian. We found many faults with the older ships, such as repairs ongoin, odors, not as stabile, less selection etc. I love the grandness and space available on the newerships. We are hoping to go on the Inspiration next summer because of the route. Any comments?

Arizona

After years at sea in the U. S. Navy, in combat ships and aboard troop transports, I was not about to take a cruise. But my wife prevailed (she always does), and off we went on Holland-America's Statendam to the Caribbean. Oh, did my old prejudices change -- marvelous service, spotless clean quarters, scrumptious food, smiling staff. Would I go again? You bet! All these horror stories make me shudder; I'm on Holland-America for life.

S.A.

Message to Rod Hoots: I did check out cruiseopinion.com and it gives the Tropicale a pretty good rating. I know of at least three cruise reviews that were submitted by three different people to that sight on the Tropicale. None of which were good, in fact they were very bad reviews. They have never been posted on the site, which tells me that they only post the fair to good reviews and do not post the ones that are not praiseing that ship in some way or another. I removed that site from my favorites menu long ago when I realized that they are only telling you what they want you to know. I tried!

B. Wolfe

Sorry you had a bad experience. I agree when the problems happen to you, who cares about others who don't experiece what you did. We have been on four cruises in seven years, three of them on Carnival. Most recently sixteen of us cruised on the Carnival Destiny. We only had good experiences with Carnival with the exception of mediocre food on the Fascination. The people were nice and friendly.(those that spoke English) We have nothing but nice things to say about Carnival.
My advice though, is to take a more expensive cruise. Your travel agent knows who the top cruise lines are. By the way, in international survey, Carnival never is picked as one of the top ten cruise lines. You now know why. Next cruise, pick one of the top five.

G.A

Last April I went on a 10 day panama canal cruise on Regal Princess and found it just wonderful. The entertainment, food, and programs were all top of the notch. Princess has the biggest, and best ships in the sea, along with the best shore exursion department. I would definetly consider cruising with them