biggieboy

Not buying that this decision was made to save on costs. Interesting set of similarities between the two cut shows. Whether it was intentional or not I don't know but it is certainly peculiar, might ruffle some feathers.

I will be cruising with my cousin soon, who lives in an area with some of the best sushi in the US. He often eats out in his area and enjoys the food, regardless if it is at a top restaurant or just a local average sushi takeout. When he comes by me, he often dislikes the 'good' local places in my area, saying the fish is bland/old or there is too much rice and too little fish. He wants to go to Izumi to eat sushi but I'm not sure if this is a good use of his time given it is cruise ship sushi. For reference he actually liked the sushi on Carnival.

Such a problem with such tasty sugary cocktails onboard. At least my wallet will be happier lol

My other concern is that some countries may decide to be stricter about not allowing ships to dock with cases, especially with high unvaxxed patients. I don't want to miss ports for this reason.

I recently booked a cruise that stops at Grand Turk on HAL's Rotterdam. We are scheduled to be in port with the Carnival Celebration. I've been here with the Carnival Magic with 4,500 passengers and we were fine but it was a little crowded, especially in the pool area. Should I look at excursions or private beaches instead of sticking with the free chair areas?

We went to the Dominican Republic, Turks and Caicos, and Bahamas and had a long embarkation wait.

Go early. Mid and late boarding was pretty bad on the 6/20 sailing but everyone who arrived early had no issue.

Not OP but I recently got off that Carnival Magic cruise and my experience was not great on Carnival's part. Hand sanitizer stations were rarely stocked. The hand washing station only worked for me once this entire cruise and I've had plenty of conversations with others about how they don't work for them as well. The tables in every venue were usually crusty, sticky, or had garbage left out. We never encountered any cleaning staff in restrooms or the buffet (only bussers taking plates, no wiping of tables). Many of this is probably due to a staffing shortage but the design of the ship also played a role. Even if hand washing and hand sanitizing stations were working, many were placed away from food and drink venues and in out-of-eye corners and nooks. People often walk through the buffet to get from midship to aft or vice versa because of the design of this ship and there was no option to hand washing upon entering the buffet (if there was it was not plainly visible).

I feel mixed about this. On one hand, testing is expensive now that many companies are beginning to charge for tests. They are not foolproof as well, given that many (including my cruising party recently) all contracted covid onboard despite negative testing requirements. Yet, I can guarantee you that people will go onboard with covid knowing that they won't be tested and so will begin the port closures and all that fun stuff again (nevermind any serious outbreaks). Maybe there is a middle ground somewhere: maybe random embarkation testing free of charge similar to that of random TSA security checks? Maybe stricter enforcement of sickly people onboard? I dont know.

The biggest problem with this was that no one was enforcing rules for embarkation time windows. Plus I witnessed multiple parties cut the line particularly on the outside line down two terminals.

On the Magic there was a lot of mahi mahi.

I was on the 6/20 Magic sailing out of NY. Embarkation was awful but I learned some tips and tricks from other guests to avoid it. Try to get the earliest embarkation time. If you don't, the wait gets longer. We waited 2 hours from arrival to walking on the ship with a 12:30 embarkation time. Other people told me the waited only 30 minutes arriving as early as possible. Capacity was high. The number we were given was 4500 people (not sure if this is just guests or guests plus employees). There were a lot of kids so I wouldn't be surprised if we were over the standard capacity. We were never able to find an open seat on the pool deck, and there was no enforcement against people hoarding chairs with towels without showing up. We had trouble disembarking, tendering, and getting luggage tags due to the high capacity. The entertainment was wonderful. We had the late dinner and usually go to bed early so we missed a lot of the stage and comedy shows but what I heard was hit or miss. We did go to one comedy show and we somewhat liked it but it was too PG for our tastes but we don't knock the comedian for this as it was a PG show. We enjoyed all live bands, orchestras, and musicians we heard around the ship. If you like entertainment I would not recommend choosing the late dinner as it often conflicts with many events (unlike the early dinner).