Part one: Sailing on Carnival
As most of my regular readers know, my partner of 15 years and I were married in March of this year. At the time, we wanted to do a vacation/honeymoon, and so we made reservations to go on the Drag Stars at Sea cruise offered by ALandCHUCK.travel. Between the two of us, we have now travelled with five different LGBTQ travel companies including Aquafest, RSVP, Atlantis, and Above and Beyond Travel, and now ALndCHUCK.travel. Over four or five posts, I want to review the cruise, with each post focusing on different aspects of the trip. In this post, I want to start talking about sailing on Carnival. But before I do, I’ll sum up the trip as having been great fun.
I have done about a dozen cruises, so there isn’t much about a cruise that would be new for me, except this was my first trip on Carnival Cruises. I admit, I’ve been a bit of a cruise snob looking down at Carnival, and had it not been for the Drag Stars at Sea, I would probably have never gone on a Carnival boat. But all in all, Carnival doesn’t deserve to be dismissed so easily. Nothing about the cruise was bad at all, and while there are things that would make it better, it wasn’t bad. It was what you would expect a cruise to be with relatively wonderful customer service, good food, good entertainment, and overall pleasantness. Still, it wasn’t really up the par of some of the Celebrity or Royal Caribbean experiences I’ve had. Even NCL experiences have topped this one, but I didn’t hate it as I expected to.
Food and Dining
This was the first cruise I’ve been on, where you selected a dining time. The choices were early seating, late seating or anytime seating, so there was some flexibility, however, there were fewer dining room choices than on other cruise lines. The food always ranged from good to really excellent, but lacked a consistency throughout a meal. One thing in a meal might be really great, while the rest was okay or good. I’d come to expect on other cruises meals where every course was a hit out of the park, so this surprised me. Still I enjoyed every meal.
My only bad dining experience was not due to the food and was one of the last nights of the cruise. I had this designer shirt on that was sleeveless though fully covered my armpits. Women’s sleeveless dresses often show more than this shirt did, but I was encouraged to go and get a jacket or change my shirt. I was ready to do so, until I saw a woman in a tank top-like blouse seated. If she can show her shoulders, why can’t a man? So, I asked to be seated as I was, and they did so with no fuss. While I get the desire to make dinner a classy affair, rules like this are not the way to do it.
Our Cabin
The cabins were fine, although not quite as nice as on some other cruise lines, but definitely nice enough even if a bit small. The real difference I experienced here was the hall ways. I’ve never been on a cruise where the hall way was always full of stuff like cleaning supplies, buckets of water, or carts full of sheets and towels. This would be anytime during the day or night. Seemed a little sloppy, especially the buckets of water.
What are they selling?
Every cruise line is constantly trying to sell you something during your cruise, from spa treatments, to photographs to souvenir drink containers. Of course, this cruise was no different, except that it seemed to me worse than I remember it from the last cruise. I usually have a high spa bill because I’m a sucker for a massage, and a facial, and probably another treatment or two during the week. I had fewer treatments than ever before, and in general, they were lackluster. They seemed more designed to sell product than to be a phenomenal treatment. That’s really a shame. I do usually buy some product (facial moisturizer and wrinkle creams are my only addiction) but I expect a killer treatment if you want me to buy creams and lotions. I think their strategy is a failed one and is bringing in less money overall, but I could be wrong.
On the other hand, they weren’t too interested in selling drinks. This is the first cruise I’ve been on where you didn’t practically have to beat waiters off with a stick trying to sell you a drink. On more than one occasion, we had to get up from our seats and go look for a bar after waiting for 15 minutes as we awaiting a show to start. At the big deck parties there were never enough waiters running around. And, this was a gay cruise! Don’t they know us queers like to drink?
Two experiences made me think that Carnival simply runs a looser ship than other companies. First was the experience with the deck theater/movie screen. One evening we were up there to watch a movie, and first it was fine, then no sound, then the sound wasn’t sync’ed right and then the picture was weird, and then it stopped, and then… you get the picture. This was a total fail in my book, and there seemed to be no cruise staff around at the time. There was no apology, no acknowledgement that this primary entertainment element failed to work.
The other experience was one night when rain hit and scrambled the big on deck party. Now, the ship has a full entertainment/cruise directing staff, and while we were directed to go to a certain entertainment venue on the boat, it wasn’t set up or ready in any way. There was no music playing and no one even seemed to know how to turn the music on. We lost interest and left. They had to know that the rain was possible, and it would have made sense for their to be some sort of plan B ready to be deployed if needed.
Would I sail on Carnival again?
I probably would but only if I got a really cheap cruise on special. Nothing about the cruise made me feel like I really mattered to them, and I’ve never experienced that before. I’ve always found cruise ship staff to bend over backwards treating you special so that I leave wanting to sail with them again.