Carnival Splendor, Singapore 24 August

[arxcards]

I have seen a copy of one of the equator crossing certificates. Did they get your surname ahead of your first name? Great that the captain on the certificate isn't even on the ship.

[cruiser3775]

Yes, Igot my certificate with surname first, no comma,then first name. Signed by two captains, not sure why.

I have found seadays dragging a bit, which surprised me, as I usually enjoy them. But the on board entertainment is dire.

Yesterday morning, you had a choice of THREE trivia events or two bingo sessions or sports, none of which interests me.

The two "enrichment" speakers are poor quality, and one of them is often totally innaccurate if he is speaking about something you happen to know anything about.

 

 

 

 

Edited September 5 by cruiser3775

[arxcards]

1 hour ago, cruiser3775 said:

Yes, Igot my certificate with surname first, no comma,then first name. Signed by two captains, not sure why.

I have found seadays dragging a bit, which surprised me, as I usually enjoy them. But the on board entertainment is dire.

Yesterday morning, you had a choice of THREE trivia events or two bingo sessions or sports, none of which interests me.

The two "enrichment" speakers are poor quality, and one of them is often totally innaccurate if he is speaking about something you happen to know anything about.

 

I trust you enjoyed some wind and a few waves over the past couple of days. We have found it hard to sync with Carnival's activities, so we usually give most of them a miss. Sadly, our most interesting activity on our last Splendor cruise was putting coins into that "tipping point" machine at the edge of the casino. Yes, the house still won, but there was more entertainment per dollar than losing it on the pokies or at bingo. Still, our food was great and we made the rest up on the run.

 

Pity about the lack of enrichment. Make sure management knows what you think of their level of integrity.

[cruiser3775]

Back in Sydney and off the ship this morning. Absolutely beautiful calm weather for our arrival at dawn.  Sydney must be one of the most beautiful ports to arrive in by cruise ship. I never get tired of that view at sunrise as you glide past the Opera House.

Once I get home and organised, I'll do a trip report.

 

[cruiser3775]

My Trip report, part 1

This was my second cruise on Carnival Splendor.  I picked it mainly for the itinerary. The ship was taking a break from its shorter cruise Australian season itinerary, going from Sydney to Singapore for three weeks in dry dock, then back from Singapore to Sydney via Indonesia, to resume the short east coast cruises.  I met other passengers who actually took the two cruises back to back, and used the long break in Singapore to travel around south east Asia, before cruising back to Sydney. I did the Singapore back to Sydney section only.

 

Carnival Splendor is branded as a “fun ship” and has a reputation as a hard partying place. Maybe that is the case on the very short cruises, but this was 17 days, and not school holidays, and there were few younger people and not many children. Lots of intergenerational adult family groups in evidence. The biggest group of cruisers were from Australia and New Zealand, followed by those from the USA and Canada, quite a few from the UK and from Germany, plus a good number of people from various Asian countries. 

 

The cruise was well booked, but I found it was entirely possible to find quiet places on the ship if you wanted to get away from crowds and loud music. Of course, you can’t get away from the décor, which is completely over the top, but it grows on you, I think. At least it’s not brown, beige and boring, like on Holland America.  The break in dry dock had included a strip and paint of the exterior, so it looked very white and gleaming, but nothing much had been changed inside that I could see.

 

The itinerary included a lot of sea days, but we stopped at six ports in 17 days, three in Indonesia and three in Australia: Jakarta, Bali, Lombok, Darwin, Airlie Beach, Moreton Island. I’m not going to comment on the port stops, but happy to answer specific questions. Here are some things I liked and disliked about the cruise ship:

 

LIKES

My cabin, an aft balcony. Nice big cabin for one person or two, wouldn’t like to have a third or fourth person in there (sofa could be changed to bunks). No armchairs, just one stool.  Reasonably plain décor (compared to the rest of the ship). Reasonable sized walk in shower, good water temperature and pressure. Plenty of cupboard space, but too many mirrors. Maybe it’s to make the cabins seem larger, but I hate looking at myself all the time. One Australian power point, one US – take adapters.  Good soundproofing. I was near the lifts and the next cabin had a baby, but I didn’t hear much except the scraping of chairs moving on the balconies from time to time. Didn’t like the TV – very small. Sitting on the sofa or the bed, you could not read words written on the screen. It’s time they upgraded the TVs.

 

The food.   I didn’t pay for any food not included, so can’t comment on speciality restaurants. There are paid extra items at all eating sessions.  Without paying extra, your options are the Main Dining Room, the Lido Buffet, a burger place, a deli, a pizzeria, and an Indian food place.

Room Service

This is a paid service only. The choices are very restricted. Worst choices of any of the four cruise lines I have been on.

I though the food in the MDR was good, but of uneven quality. Some things just didn’t work, like anything Chinese or Japanese.  Red meat dishes were good quality, and so was fish and seafood. The serves were very small, prompting people to routinely order two starters, or two main courses. I found that if you ate later, say 8pm, the quantities became even smaller. I ordered a grilled mushroom starter one evening and got two tiny pieces of mushroom about the size of postage stamps. 

The brunch offerings on sea days in the Gold Pearl Restaurant were good quality and a variety of choices..

The burgers were fine, though the chips need improvement. Didn’t try the pizza slices. The deli did good sandwiches and buns to order. The Indian food place, Masala Tiger, was a standout. Excellent Indian food at lunchtime, and now it also opens in the evening, for a small extra charge.

The Lido buffet is large and varied. Many different breakfast choices. It basically serves the same food as the main dining room at night, but you get to choose the combinations and the quantities you want.  There is always a choice of salads, as well as the hot foods. The dessert section is the best I have found on the less expensive cruise lines, and always varied from day to day.  On the final day, they did a memorable chocolate extravaganza.

The buffet gets crowded. I adjusted my eating times to later and avoided the crowds by having breakfast after 9.30 am (good excuse to sleep in), lunch after 1.30 pm, and dinner when the shows were on.

 

Entertainment shows

I didn’t go to any of the comedy shows.

I really don’t have mainstream tastes in music, so a lot of the offerings didn’t do much for me. I did enjoy some of the singers, particularly a duo with acoustic guitars, who didn’t rely on recorded backup tracks to cover over their deficiencies.  The sound and lighting systems on the ship are very good.

Most of the big shows were rock music, not my thing, so I’m not commenting, though I did wish there was more variety.  I liked the Crew performance, particularly the three Elvis impersonators. The Spanish Elvis, one of the ship’s engineers, I think, was hilarious – “Mi llama Elveeees” he introduced himself.  The two acrobats did a very skilful performance with good lighting effects and many costume changes.

 

Shore excursions

I only went on one of the expensive ship’s excursions, on Lombok. Other places, I booked private excursions or just wandered around. The Lombok excursion, to three craft villages then lunch at a beach resort, was very well organised and ran efficiently.  No problems with the organisation and getting ashore for excursions.

Part 2 to come

 

[cruiser3775]

My trip report, part 2

DISLIKES

 

My general comment is that Carnival seems to think everyone on a cruise just wants to turn off their brain and coast along.

Enrichment Speakers

There were two, for the whole 17 days. One was a cartoonist. The other was an “expert” on many things, apparently. We were never told exactly what he was going to be sharing his expertise on, at any given session.  I went twice before I gave up. My first time, he was speaking about Darwin, a place I am familiar with. He had old, scratched slides without proper captions.  He kept getting muddled and sidetracking about what he was speaking about, into pointless personal anecdotes. Once he put up a slide of a street scene, and paused, then said “I don’t know where this is”! Unfortunately, he gave out some totally inaccurate information on Darwin, and, after a crew member spoke to him, he was forced to correct it.   I really think it is time Carnival retired him. They also need to clearly state in advance what each session is about, including which sessions will be background information about the next port visit.

 

General Activities. They were limited and poor. The main choices were Bingo and Trivia, sometimes two or three sessions of each, plus various rather juvenile sporting contests. There’s must be many other things that can be offered in the general interest category. The rest were the usual thinly disguised promos for the shops, the art gallery, the casino and the spa.

 

Library. It was appalling. The library room had rows of bookcases which were almost empty. On the first day, I counted 20 books in total, of which maybe eight were in languages other than English. It never got any better. They advertised a ‘book mobile’ which was propped outside the coffee shop or in the Cool Room on some days. The ad photo of it showed it filled with scores of books. The reality was seven dogeared books, again not all in English.   The only books I managed to borrow were ones left by other passengers after the first few days, not the m.i.a. ship’s books.

 

TV

Apart from the old, dated and small screens, the whole setup is vague and hard to follow. It took me a while before I realised I could look at the ship’s progress on a map in my cabin.  Even then, the Carnival maps are so generalised that you can’t get much information. Other cruise lines do much better maps using satellite technology. If the airlines can do it, cruise ships should also be able to.  Then there were the actual free TV offerings. Only two news channels – ABC Australia, and BBC. Nothing from the rest of the world.  Movie selection was very limited, and, biggest insult, they expected you to pay extra to view some of them.

 

Coffee

The free coffee in the Lido is dire. Cheap acidic beans, and long life milk. You have to pay at the coffee shop if you want better quality (or bring your own, as I did). Tea bags were confined to two -  Darjeeling or anonymous ‘Green Tea’. No herbal teas offered.  The coffee served in the dining room for breakfast is better quality.

 

Ice cream

This is self service in the Lido. It is supposed to be a choice of standard ice cream and frozen yoghurt in different flavours. On this cruise, the only flavour was vanilla, and there was no FroYo,  There were squeeze bottles of choc and strawberry topping you could add.

 

Bacon

Not available for breakfast every day, for some reason (cost cutting?). When it was available, it was the cheapest, most thin cheap cuts (more than 50% fat), heavily overcooked, so it broke into tiny bits, and swimming in fat because they made no attempt to drain it after cooking.

 

Mongolian Wok

My last trip, you picked up your bowl, added the ingredients you liked from the display, specified which of the meats or tofu you wanted, and had a choice of three sauces. Then they stir fried your selection while you waited.  This trip, the cook chose the ingredients, stir fried them in great batches, then dished out a portion of the resulting mess to you. Once was enough.

 

Room Service

A totally extra paid service. No ‘breakfast menu on the door knob the night before’ option. Very limited choice of dishes.

Drinks

I’m a wine drinker. The lowest priced wines are rubbish – costing $45 or more for something you can buy in Australia for less than $10 a bottle. The selection of wines by the glass was very limited, only one or two choices in each kind of wine. To get more options, it was necessary to buy wine by the bottle. They would keep this for you in the MDR, so you could drink it over a number of meals. This system worked well, but actually getting the right bottle was a problem. The waiters do not receive adequate training. The wines are numbered, so you can ask for eg. a “number 43”. In theory, this should make it easier for waiters with no knowledge, but, in practice, they don’t understand that the name of the wine company is not the only thing they need to look for.  I had a battle to get them to understand when I asked for a Shiraz, I did not want a Pinot Noir from the same company, for example.  When you are paying $50+ for a bottle, this matters.

 

Announcements

Many of the crew have strong accents. These are not the best people to make public announcements, particularly about safety issues, disembarkment etc. For many passengers, English is a second language.  Carnival should designate one person who speaks clear standard English and does not speak quickly (like the almost incomprehensible gabbling of the Cruise Director). The sound quality in the public areas and corridors is uneven, and often overwhelmed by background noise. The ship’s time changed four times during the voyage, and I never heard a single announcement about it. It should also be listed in the daily “Fun Times” newsletter.

 

This rant sounds like I hated the cruise, but, in fact, I did enjoy it and was sorry to be getting off. Most of my dislikes were minor things that didn’t ruin the rest of the cruise. It’s just that there were some very obvious cost cutting measures, plus some annoying things, many of which could be easily fixed by Carnival.

I’m happy to answer specific questions if I can help anyone.

 

 

[ceeceeDee]

2 hours ago, cruiser3775 said:

My trip report, part 2

DISLIKES

 

 

 

My general comment is that Carnival seems to think everyone on a cruise just wants to turn off their brain and coast along.

 

Enrichment Speakers

 

There were two, for the whole 17 days. One was a cartoonist. The other was an “expert” on many things, apparently. We were never told exactly what he was going to be sharing his expertise on, at any given session.  I went twice before I gave up. My first time, he was speaking about Darwin, a place I am familiar with. He had old, scratched slides without proper captions.  He kept getting muddled and sidetracking about what he was speaking about, into pointless personal anecdotes. Once he put up a slide of a street scene, and paused, then said “I don’t know where this is”! Unfortunately, he gave out some totally inaccurate information on Darwin, and, after a crew member spoke to him, he was forced to correct it.   I really think it is time Carnival retired him. They also need to clearly state in advance what each session is about, including which sessions will be background information about the next port visit.

 

 

 

General Activities. They were limited and poor. The main choices were Bingo and Trivia, sometimes two or three sessions of each, plus various rather juvenile sporting contests. There’s must be many other things that can be offered in the general interest category. The rest were the usual thinly disguised promos for the shops, the art gallery, the casino and the spa.

 

 

 

Library. It was appalling. The library room had rows of bookcases which were almost empty. On the first day, I counted 20 books in total, of which maybe eight were in languages other than English. It never got any better. They advertised a ‘book mobile’ which was propped outside the coffee shop or in the Cool Room on some days. The ad photo of it showed it filled with scores of books. The reality was seven dogeared books, again not all in English.   The only books I managed to borrow were ones left by other passengers after the first few days, not the m.i.a. ship’s books.

 

 

 

TV

 

Apart from the old, dated and small screens, the whole setup is vague and hard to follow. It took me a while before I realised I could look at the ship’s progress on a map in my cabin.  Even then, the Carnival maps are so generalised that you can’t get much information. Other cruise lines do much better maps using satellite technology. If the airlines can do it, cruise ships should also be able to.  Then there were the actual free TV offerings. Only two news channels – ABC Australia, and BBC. Nothing from the rest of the world.  Movie selection was very limited, and, biggest insult, they expected you to pay extra to view some of them.

 

 

 

Coffee

 

The free coffee in the Lido is dire. Cheap acidic beans, and long life milk. You have to pay at the coffee shop if you want better quality (or bring your own, as I did). Tea bags were confined to two -  Darjeeling or anonymous ‘Green Tea’. No herbal teas offered.  The coffee served in the dining room for breakfast is better quality.

 

 

 

Ice cream

 

This is self service in the Lido. It is supposed to be a choice of standard ice cream and frozen yoghurt in different flavours. On this cruise, the only flavour was vanilla, and there was no FroYo,  There were squeeze bottles of choc and strawberry topping you could add.

 

 

 

Bacon

 

Not available for breakfast every day, for some reason (cost cutting?). When it was available, it was the cheapest, most thin cheap cuts (more than 50% fat), heavily overcooked, so it broke into tiny bits, and swimming in fat because they made no attempt to drain it after cooking.

 

 

 

Mongolian Wok

 

My last trip, you picked up your bowl, added the ingredients you liked from the display, specified which of the meats or tofu you wanted, and had a choice of three sauces. Then they stir fried your selection while you waited.  This trip, the cook chose the ingredients, stir fried them in great batches, then dished out a portion of the resulting mess to you. Once was enough.

 

 

 

Room Service

 

A totally extra paid service. No ‘breakfast menu on the door knob the night before’ option. Very limited choice of dishes.

Drinks

 

I’m a wine drinker. The lowest priced wines are rubbish – costing $45 or more for something you can buy in Australia for less than $10 a bottle. The selection of wines by the glass was very limited, only one or two choices in each kind of wine. To get more options, it was necessary to buy wine by the bottle. They would keep this for you in the MDR, so you could drink it over a number of meals. This system worked well, but actually getting the right bottle was a problem. The waiters do not receive adequate training. The wines are numbered, so you can ask for eg. a “number 43”. In theory, this should make it easier for waiters with no knowledge, but, in practice, they don’t understand that the name of the wine company is not the only thing they need to look for.  I had a battle to get them to understand when I asked for a Shiraz, I did not want a Pinot Noir from the same company, for example.  When you are paying $50+ for a bottle, this matters.

 

 

 

Announcements

 

Many of the crew have strong accents. These are not the best people to make public announcements, particularly about safety issues, disembarkment etc. For many passengers, English is a second language.  Carnival should designate one person who speaks clear standard English and does not speak quickly (like the almost incomprehensible gabbling of the Cruise Director). The sound quality in the public areas and corridors is uneven, and often overwhelmed by background noise. The ship’s time changed four times during the voyage, and I never heard a single announcement about it. It should also be listed in the daily “Fun Times” newsletter.

 

 

 

This rant sounds like I hated the cruise, but, in fact, I did enjoy it and was sorry to be getting off. Most of my dislikes were minor things that didn’t ruin the rest of the cruise. It’s just that there were some very obvious cost cutting measures, plus some annoying things, many of which could be easily fixed by Carnival.

 

I’m happy to answer specific questions if I can help anyone.

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks for your overview, Cruiser. It seems, like I have thought/said before, cruise lines are cutting back and instigating more up-charges. Seems like a lot of people are putting P&O in front of the firing squad for it, but other lines are doing the same even though the initial cost of the cruise is more expensive to start with. I shudder to think what will happen next March when Carnival absorbs P&O. Not that it is of great concern to me. I very much doubt we will be going over to Carnival.

[arxcards]

13 hours ago, cruiser3775 said:

TV

 

Apart from the old, dated and small screens, the whole setup is vague and hard to follow. It took me a while before I realised I could look at the ship’s progress on a map in my cabin.  Even then, the Carnival maps are so generalised that you can’t get much information. Other cruise lines do much better maps using satellite technology. If the airlines can do it, cruise ships should also be able to.  Then there were the actual free TV offerings. Only two news channels – ABC Australia, and BBC. Nothing from the rest of the world.  Movie selection was very limited, and, biggest insult, they expected you to pay extra to view some of them.

 

Bacon

 

Not available for breakfast every day, for some reason (cost cutting?). When it was available, it was the cheapest, most thin cheap cuts (more than 50% fat), heavily overcooked, so it broke into tiny bits, and swimming in fat because they made no attempt to drain it after cooking.

 

Mongolian Wok

 

My last trip, you picked up your bowl, added the ingredients you liked from the display, specified which of the meats or tofu you wanted, and had a choice of three sauces. Then they stir fried your selection while you waited.  This trip, the cook chose the ingredients, stir fried them in great batches, then dished out a portion of the resulting mess to you. Once was enough.

 

Drinks

 

I’m a wine drinker. The lowest priced wines are rubbish – costing $45 or more for something you can buy in Australia for less than $10 a bottle. The selection of wines by the glass was very limited, only one or two choices in each kind of wine. To get more options, it was necessary to buy wine by the bottle. They would keep this for you in the MDR, so you could drink it over a number of meals. This system worked well, but actually getting the right bottle was a problem. The waiters do not receive adequate training. The wines are numbered, so you can ask for eg. a “number 43”. In theory, this should make it easier for waiters with no knowledge, but, in practice, they don’t understand that the name of the wine company is not the only thing they need to look for.  I had a battle to get them to understand when I asked for a Shiraz, I did not want a Pinot Noir from the same company, for example.  When you are paying $50+ for a bottle, this matters.

 

I have trimmed down to just the points that lead us to not choosing Carnival as a regular option. Locally, they are the best we have for winter though, so we are starting to head overseas for our winter travels again. I would have hoped that drydock led to some improvements, but it is more of the same as we had in July.

 

TV is garbage - both the mini SD screens, the crap channels, and the minor selection of pay-per-view movies. After the modern large interactive HD screens on Princess, it is hard to take what Carnival is dishing up. Yes, we don't cruise for TV either, but it is nice to catch-up either side of bed time, and it was hard to read info screens even with reading glasses.

 

Bacon - hopefully they still have rations of rashers in Gold Pearl, extra crispy to burn-off some of the fat content.

 

Mongolian Wok - they did this in July too. We were looking at the board for our embarkation lunch, and the server just pointed to the tub of whatever and the sign that tried to describe it. Barb is allergic to mushrooms, so asked about that, and was assured there were none. There was, so off to the deli.

 

Drinks - on a cruise ship, you are not going to get club prices for wines, beers, or anything alcoholic. Yes, you could often buy a bottle at Dan's for not much more than a glass on Carnival, or pretty much most of the main cruise lines. Compared to Princess and P&O wine by the glass options, I think Carnival stack up better. Our waiter had no issue with the bottles we ordered, so they do learn in time. Our open bottles were waiting for us at the table the following night. It would be nice to have dedicated wine waiters or sommeliers, but it's definitely not a Carnival trait.

[Aussgirl]

Thanks for the good overview.  

Just wondering if you organised the visa for Indonesia yourself or was it done through the ship?  If you did it yourself, did you have any problems? Thanks for any insight.

[cruiser3775]

1 hour ago, Aussgirl said:

ust wondering if you organised the visa for Indonesia yourself or was it done through the ship?  If you did it yourself, did you have any problems?

I did it myself, because my first port of call I had a private shore excursion booked, and I wanted to be sure I could get off the ship quickly, not wait in a queue. It also speeded up departing from Singapore, because they wanted to see it, and they attached it to my passport. It is a fairly easy visa to get online, and costs less that the ship charges to do it for you. Just use the link in the Smarttraveller website for Indonesia, found under the sub heading Travel.  You need the post code for the first port you arrive at, in order to fill in the form.  My travel agent supplied this for me. There's a thread somewhere on CC about filling in the form - search under Indonesian Visa for Australians.

[cruiser3775]

10 hours ago, arxcards said:

I have trimmed down to just the points that lead us to not choosing Carnival as a regular option. Locally, they are the best we have for winter though, so we are starting to head overseas for our winter travels again.

Yes, I agree with your observations. 

I did anytime dining and shared tables, so got different waiters each time I dined in the MDR, and none of them had been trained properly about serving wine. A couple of hours short course would fix that.

Bacon in the Gold Pearl for breakfast was much better quality than the buffet, and not incinerated. 

The TV problem could be easily improved. It's not a deal breaker for me either, but it is annoying. I did have a quiet laugh at the thought of all the passengers from the USA not being able to get their fix of US news channels. When I did the month long trans-pacific cruise on Princess a few months ago, there were five US news/sport channels for them, but nothing for Australians, so the tables were turned on this cruise. Of course, you could pay for the expensive satellite internet connection, but several people I spoke to said it was hopelessly slow and kept dropping out. Not what you want when you have paid hundreds for it. I chose to spend that money on drinks instead, and used the wi fi in the port terminals.

I do have one other dislike to add, that I forgot about before. It's the bench seats in the dining rooms. They are way too low for the table height. Must have been designed by a tall man, because the average height woman sitting at one has the table top at around armpit height. Some of the petite Asian passengers only had their head peeping over the table top. Of course, they are also too low for older people to get out of easily.  Carnival needs to saw a few inches off all the table legs, but I guess that's too hard.

I won't put Carnival high on my list for repeat cruises, but the problem is that they are almost the only cruise choice in our winter months, unless you take a long flight to somewhere first.

[Aussgirl]

5 hours ago, cruiser3775 said:

I did it myself, because my first port of call I had a private shore excursion booked, and I wanted to be sure I could get off the ship quickly, not wait in a queue. It also speeded up departing from Singapore, because they wanted to see it, and they attached it to my passport. It is a fairly easy visa to get online, and costs less that the ship charges to do it for you. Just use the link in the Smarttraveller website for Indonesia, found under the sub heading Travel.  You need the post code for the first port you arrive at, in order to fill in the form.  My travel agent supplied this for me. There's a thread somewhere on CC about filling in the form - search under Indonesian Visa for Australians.

Thanks for the info.  Will have a try at doing it ourselves.