DallasGuy75219

If the question is about Carnival (and not P&O), the Hub app now shows a breakdown of the daily gratuity charges.

However FTTF doesn't seem to be selling out on just about every cruise like it used to. People used to post here about checking daily to see if slots had opened up, but on my last few cruises it seems FTTF is always available. Probably just not as many takers since they've jacked up the prices so much.

Last month Valor was in pretty ragged shape in some areas. I'll see if Glory is equally ragged next month. Seems like Carnival is deferring as much maintenance and replacement as possible to save cash flow and pay down their COVID-era debt. Used to be that a 20 year old Carnival ship didn't show much more wear and tear than a 5 year old ship, but now I guess anything much older than Vista class is showing its age.

The issue is that the measurement of THC content on cannabis product labels isn't regulated, so people can get and have gotten busted when the actual THC content is higher than the labeled content and the federal limit.

All other things equal, Princess for me. Carnival has just cut too much from every facet of the cruise experience, and its low prices seem to attract an increasingly uncouth and ill-mannered demographic that I don't care to be around.

That happens at debarkation on most Carnival sailings. The congestion isn't due to people who don't have passports but rather people who can't or won't follow instructions. Too many people try to debark before their group is called and the entire debarkation process jams up and comes to a halt. Carnival has to completely stop debarkations until the terminal begins to clear. People who checked luggage but debark before their group is called are the worst offenders, because they're often taking up space in the teminal waiting because their checked bags haven't been unloaded yet. Even when CDs warn people not to come down before their group is called, because the above will occur, they do it anyway. I haven't seen this nearly to this degree on other cruise lines. Carnival seems to attract more than its fair share of the "I paid my $299 for this cruise so I'll do what I want when I want" crowd vs. other lines.

Carnival definitely uses charter buses to/from the airport in Miami.

Not sure what agenda you're trying to push by posting random CDC websites, but if we're going to discuss facts: That webpage only discusses gastrointestinal illness (i.e., not COVID). That webpage does not state hand sanitizers do not work. https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/vsp/pub/handwashing/handwashingtips.htm, linked from that webpage, states, "If water and soap are NOT available (perhaps on excursions), use an ethanol alcohol-based hand sanitizer, preferably in a gel form. The sanitizer should be at least 60% ethanol." This is the reality at most Carnival buffets; on most ships Carnival has not added handwashing stations in any number sufficient to accommodate everyone eating at the buffet, as have for example Royal Caribbean and Princess.

I'd avoid New Orleans. While the city itself very much has an anything goes attitude, New Orleans cruises draw primarily from the southern and southeast US (except for Florida, which already has a plethora of homeports), where unfortunately small-mindedness can still be common. Before I get flamed for stereotyping, I'm a gay man born and raised in the Deep South and often cruise out of New Orleans as I have family relatively close. For OP, it may depend on how obvious it is that his DIL is trans, but I was among a group of about 100 gay men on a cruise out of New Orleans about a month ago, and some other passengers were less than pleased (and vocal about it) to be on the same sailing with the group.

That's really not necessary in New Orleans. The Erato cruise terminal is on a pretty small scale and it's never taken me more than 5 or 10 minutes to check bags. In fact if you're trying to check bags at 9:00, you'll be fighting against the flow of debarking passengers and the traffic of vehicles them up.

There's a below-deck economy of crew members with side hustles providing services for other crew members, e.g. haircuts and laundry, in addition to stewards paying their paisanos to help them as assistants.

I've had it before, always with lunch items on the menu and the entree choices are usually steak, a seafood option, and a vegetarian option. I just about always go because the quality is better than just about anything else available for lunch. I usually get the steak, which is always a better cut than the everyday menu steak in the MDR for dinner or the steak and eggs at brunch. I stopped cruising Carnival so much due to their cuts after the restart. Since the restart I've only had one sailing with the cocktail party instead of lunch--on Splendor out of Australia last year--and that was in the evening. Before the restart the cocktail parties were always in the evening, so this is my first morning cocktail party. I don't see a logical reason for scheduling them in the morning, other than encouraging people not to come because they don't want to go to a cocktail party that early.

No, depends on how many Diamonds are onboard. On my 5-day Valor cruise over Halloween week there were only 30-something of us. Apparently that's not enough for lunch, so we got a cocktail party with passed hors d'oeuvres in the Paris Hot Lounge--which didn't make much sense for a reception before noon. On every other ship where the event was a cocktail party, it's been in the late afternoon or evening.

No

On GoCCL, the description of the work completed in drydock includes "1 large hot tub spa replaced 2 hot tub spas in Serenity". Elation got Alchemy in March 2020, right before the COVID shutdown. Meanwhile in 2023 Carnival is using every penny of cash flow it can spare to pay down debt from the shutdown. I suspect with the remaining life of the 2 last Fantasy class ships, there wasn't sufficient return on investment to justify putting adding Alchemy to Paradise.

Prior sailings are irrelevant. The SOLAS muster drill requirement stands alone for each passenger on each sailing. And part of the requirement is to know where to go in the event mustering is required. The locations of the muster stations vary by ship and by stateroom within the same ship, so no amount of prior sailings is necessarily going to help you get to your muster station on your current cruise.

That's not how ir's supposed to work. The SOLAS muster drill requirement is for each passenger, not a representative from each stateroom. When they scan one S&S card, they can see everyone assigned to that cabin on their tablets, but they're only supposed to select those who are physically present as having checked in, for obvious reasons.

Other cruise lines (at least the ones I sail regularly) have not cut nearly as drastically as Carnival. So Carnival is now my distant third choice after Princess and Royal.

No, each adult can bring both a bottle of wine and a 12-pack of soda in their carry-on luggage. I've done it myself numerous times. Number of cabins doesn't matter. Carnival's limits are per person, not per cabin.

Second cup?? On the Valor two weeks ago we were lucky to get the first cup we requested, and the MDR crew weren't doing double duty in the show lounge either.

Not when you post them on a public bulletin board with the quote function. And I quoted you, so stop acting like I'm taking credit for your photographic masterpiece.

I wasn't replying to your comment, was I? 🙄

They serve only wine on the Excel class not to be cheap but because the theaters were not built with bars to support drink service, unlike all the prior ships where there are bar servers serving drinks in the theater before shows and before and during other events. Thus there are not facilities to serve mixed drinks and store/serve anything other than a few varieties of wine on as large of a scale as the P/D party. That's why they also load a drink on your S&S, so you can still get your drink of choice somewhere else.

The soft serve definitely isn't ice cream, and doesn't look or taste like ice cream either. Look at the picture below; it's "dessert mix," not even allowed to be called ice cream. The first 3 ingredientes are water, corn syrup, and oíl, and all the daily ingredients are powdered.

With all that bacon used, the Great Bacon Shortage🙄 must have been its downfall 🥓