steveknj

We always bring our passports. We are going to a foreign country (at least when we go to Grand Turk) so if anything happens, I don't need any extra hassles. Obviously San Juan and St. Thomas are US territories, so you wouldn't need one there.

Are you driving down the day of the cruise or planning to spend the night in NY/NJ?

Welcome aboard. Hopefully after drydock and we see what this ship is all about, we'll get some more action here.

Don't want to take this extremely off topic, but DirecTV is owned primarily by AT&T thought 30% is owned by another company that has taken over the management. They made a financial decision to jettison Sunday Ticket as it was bleeding them money. I agree with you that the model is broken and they are trying some new things, but ST wasn't going to help them make money.

Interesting phrasing in that DirecTV didn't want ST any longer, so they didn't quite STEAL it from them. They MIGHT have stolen it from Apple however, who was the front runner until they dropped out. I'm not convinced that sports betting on cruise ships is a good idea. But I guess there are enough who do.

At the 85 day mark today. Only 2 posts. Kind of disappointed!! Anyone else going to join us on this cruise? Info is trickling out as the ship does it's dry dock. Hopefully will know more soon.

Interesting. Using the app on NCL it worked like 90% of the time pretty quickly and it allows calls between two cruisers. So it sounds like the NCL app might be better. Android user here, I'll have to see how Google Chat might work as a solution here.

As someone who's sailed primarily on NCL and have also done a couple of RCCL and CCL voyages, here are a few things I have liked about Carnival. 1) More choices of places for lunch! We are not buffet people, so Carnival has various options that are NOT the main dining room or buffet for lunch. 2) More of a party atmosphere than the other two. RCCL is, to me very kids oriented, with lots of amusement park type things to do, and NCL is more laid back, CCL is a party waiting to break out at any moment, and their cruise directors are very active and engaged with the passengers. 3) Comedy acts seem more of a thing on Carnival. I love stand up and loved that on these cruises. NCL used to have a partnership with Second City, but the last two cruises (post pandemic) they didn't have it. We did two cruises last year and by the second one, I was bored and ready for something different. 4) Excursions seems to be less expensive than what I paid for on NCL. Other than that, to me, a cruise is what you make of it.

I assume it's $5 for the whole cruise for the Carnival Texting plan? (I think NCL is now $10 per cruise, used to be $5). For $10 for the two of us, I'm not going to worry if any of these texting options on iPhone or Android will work. If it was $10 per day ($5 each) then I might look for the alternative. I always "unplug" on cruises and never by a wifi plan. In many (most) ports I can text with my T-Mobile plan, so for stuff from home I wait for the port. Feels old school and refreshing not being bothered all day long by calls, texts or emails. 🙂

We are set for end of July. Plenty of reviews to be read by then, and hopefully whatever kinks there are after drydock and the first bunch of voyages will be ironed out by the time we go. Everything I read so far sounds like it should be an interesting ship. Haven't done a Carnival cruise in a few years.

The problem is, as others have pointed out, is that NOBODY has sailed on it yet in it's current form (and the previous sailings have been out of China. So this is why you've seen very little about it and you probably won't get much feedback until it does it's maiden voyage in a couple of months. We are going on it toward the end of July. I've watched whatever videos are available on YouTube and they all show the same concept pics and current pics of what it looks like now. None of us know anything different at this point. So I wouldn't expect any action on your thread until we get much more info. Most of us know about all there is to know at this point.

I've sailed CCL twice and I noticed that the crowd and vibe was much different between our New Orleans departure and our New York departure. We are sailing Carnival from New York in July which should tell you which crowd we enjoyed better. I'm all for partying and having fun, but we just found the vibe closer to what we enjoy sailing out of NY than we did from New Orleans. And of course that could be a cultural thing too, since we are from the Northeast and I am a native New Yorker, and we've mostly sailed out of Northeast ports (did one other non-northeast cruise out of Seattle, which was on NCL and more laid back than usual.)

We used to do something similar as the NJ Transit bus to PA stops a few minutes from my house and then taking a cab from PA to the pier. Last couple of times we just decided to drive in (NCL cruises leave on Sunday and traffic is pretty much non existent on Sunday mornings.) We have a cruise on this ship end of July and we are debating what we want to do. I know parking is expensive, but pretty convenient, but traffic could make it less fun. The train does sound like a possibility provided I could get someone to drive us to the station.

Here's what you will always get when you ask a general question on CC. You'll get some who love it, some who hate it. The people who hate it will usually say they hate it and complain about A) Food Quality, B) Crowds C) Service D) All of the above. Those who love it will say they love the A) Food Quality B) Don't mind the crowds C) The service was excellent) D) All of the above. If you have some specific questions, you'll probably get a better answer 🙂 That said, as many have said here, it is what you make it. I'd say, you'll probably have a great time despite what everyone says, unless you have a particularly bad experience about some specific thing. That's generally how it is with any of my cruises on any line I've been on.

Remember, Pepsi has gone through quite a few L&L sodas trying to compete with Sprite. There was MistTwist, there was Slice and also Teem. I've always liked Pepsi's previous L&L variants better than Sprite (but always preferred Coca Cola to Pepsi Cola). We have a bottle of Starry that we haven't tried yet. Hopefully it's fine. I prefer Iced Tea to any of them anyway, and will probably drink that on our upcoming cruises.

It's going to take time for MSC to be established in the US. Europeans know the name and thus come here, but over time, especially with the advertising blitz, there will be more and more Americans. I agree, they can't be exactly like the others, and having that "European" feel will differentiate it some. Could be a reason why Carnival is bringing the two Costa ships to the US and are promoting them as "Cruising Italian Style". Something new and different for the US market.

NCL already offers that on most of the cruises already. Doesn't stop people from sailing on the competition.

From what I read about MSC in the US market, it's not about bringing Europeans to come sail in N. America, but to get Americans to sail her in the US. I think they are new here and they need to work to understand the US market. Once they do that, I DO think they can put a dent in the current marketplace. They are certainly advertising now a lot here, I think as much as any of the other cruise lines. I haven't booked an MSC cruise yet, but my son is taking his first cruise on MSC out of Brooklyn and he'll give us the skinny on how it was. Price wise it was VERY competitive to the other cruises coming out of NY. The reason we haven't tried it is because it's the same tired ports, Port Canaveral, Nassau and their Private Island. I've done that cruise enough times already to be bored with it. If he likes it though, we'll probably give it a go at some point.

Ultimately it all doesn't matter where it came from, if it's Italian or Italian inspired. If it's good and you enjoy it, then it doesn't matter. I used to be so snobby about pizza. If it wasn't NY Pizza it wasn't authentic and I wouldn't eat it. I went to other regions of the country and it just wasn't very good. But it has nothing to do with if it's "real" pizza or not, but what I grew up eating. Over the years, I've eaten good pizza in lots of locations. I like Chicago style pizza, it's different, and good, but it's not the same as NY style. That doesn't make it bad. To me, "bad" pizza is when it tastes like cardboard or like the stuff you get in the freezer case. Otherwise, there's no reason it can't be good pizza, even if regionalized to what works in that region. I haven't had the chicken parm on any cruise, so I can't say if it's good or bad, but if it's good, who cares if it's authentic (for the record, when I cruise, I usually take it as an opportunity to eat something I don't normally at home...my DW makes good chicken parm, so I don't eat that when I go out or take a cruise.

And that's it, in a nutshell. It has nothing to do with the "people" on the cruise. It has everything to do with what your expectations are for the cruise. If you want non stop entertainment, want to have plenty of available activities, then a cruise line like Carnival, maybe RCCL would be your best bet. If you want a more laid back, formal atmosphere, then Celebrity, or Holland America, or one of the luxury lines are what you want. And there are people of all "statuses" that want either. Price does play a part in that, but price doesn't play into people acting like jerks.

Not saying your wrong, though Celebrity costs more (at least on the surface) so of course the demo is different. It's the Lexus crowd versus the Subaru crowd. But a drunk is a drunk and there are plenty of rich obnoxious drunks, you don't have to be poor to be obnoxious. You may not be a snob, but your statement comes off as snobbish. Now, if you said that Celebrity cruises are a bit more elegant, a bit less gaudy, then yeah, that makes more sense to me. Because you pay for that sort of thing. But your examples of it being a "Walmart" cruise because of obnoxious drunks and rude behavior just don't hold water. There's plenty of that to go around. Now, I have experienced the passengers being different culturally from different departure ports to be a thing. And that's just how things are. When you leave out of NYC you sail with a lot of people from the Northeast, when you sail out of New Orleans you sail with a lot of southerners. There are cultural differences. Some people like that, some people don't.

Couldn't that type of behavior happen on ANY ship? I've encountered rude inconsiderate people on a CCL ship, but I have also encountered them on an NCL ship as well (where my son almost inadvertently got involved in a fight between two drunks in a club). Too much booze, and people who can't handle it is a recipe for that type of behavior, and the fact that Celebrity offers "free" booze to everyone (without having to purchase a drinks package) would make me think you are MORE likely to encounter that sort of behavior on a Celebrity cruise. What you seem to be saying is that you don't want to socialize with the "riff raff" on a cruise that might cost less. Fair enough, if that's the snob you want to be.

The majority of our cruises have been on NCL, but have done 2 on Carnival and 2 on Royal as well. Post Covid we did two NCL cruises and I have to say, there were times, especially on Sea Days that I was so bored I wound up watching TV in our cabin. Never had that on any previous cruise. I think NCL is trying to become more upscale these days. They offer "free" booze and stuff on just about every cruise now, and I think that's the vibe they are going for now. That said, it could be just post Covid adjustments. There were fewer daily activities. We love playing trivia and there were fewer trivia games, especially on the second cruise we took at the end of the summer. Could be lack of staff too. We are revisiting Carnival this summer (new Italian Style cruise out of NYC, our home port), and we are looking for a bit more fun. One thing I noticed is that are a lot more free food options than on NCL, and that appeals to me, especially for lunch, where on NCL it was either the buffet (and we don't generally like buffets, due to crowds) or sitting in the MDR. So places like Guys and the new Mexi-Italian place for lunch appeals to us. The shows at night on NCL are top notch and are abridged broadway shows (Six, Million Dollar Quartet were the last two we saw) while it looks like Carnival has the more classic review type shows. That's fine. We just want a little more fun this time around. Never sailed Celebrity though as the destinations and price seemed a bit high for us.

Surprised there's no Roll Call yet!! We are booked on this one (not fully paid up though!) First Carnival Cruise since, I think, 2017 when the Horizon was new and sailed out of NYC. We are excited to see how this ship is and looking for something different! Last two cruises were on NCL in 2022 and last pre-Covid cruise was on RCCL. From what I've seen it looks pretty awesome. We've never been to Grand Turk or St. Thomas, so that's something new too. Welcome aboard the roll call everyone!

We like the combination of ship and destination usually but there are times when we didn't care about the destination and just wanted to cruise (that was true this year when we did our first post-covid cruise in March). We often like going on "newer" ships because it's an experience to do something "different" and yet still cruise. We have cruised mostly NCL, but have done 2 RCCL and our upcoming July cruise will be our 3rd Carnival. We are lucky that we have a port 45 minutes from home, so that makes it easy and with flying the way it has been recently, we would prefer not to have to fly. So that's why we did two NCL cruises on two ships we had never been on in 2022, and we'll be trying the Venezia this summer. It's nice that we will be going to two ports we've never been to, Grand Turk (which we were supposed to go to on the Horizon but due to a medical emergency on board, we never made it) and St. Thomas, so that will make it more interesting as well. We had considered a European cruise on NCL, but with the flying tumult, we decided not to bother. This will work well for us. Ultimately a cruise is what you make of it. I've had great times on every cruise I've been on and usually we go on whatever cruise line gives us the best combination of "bang for the buck", location we are interested in, convenience and possible "newness to us" factor. This year that's Carnival, last year it was NCL, before the pandemic, we did a RCCL (mostly because we were cruising with a group). And we had a great time on ALL of them. We love cruising and are not that picky.