I’m currently sailing an 8-day Southern Caribbean Cruise on the Carnival Celebration, which checks off all three routes the newest ship in the Carnival fleet takes out of its home port, PortMiami. Since I have pretty extensively reviewed the ship during my previous two cruises, this trip I’ll be posting highlights and lowlights of the trip. If you’re looking for more detailed information and reviews of the ship itself, be sure to check these out:
- 7-Day Western Carnival Celebration Cruise Review (April 2023)
- 7-Day Eastern Carnival Celebration Cruise (June 2023)
The Southern Caribbean route stops at the “ABC Islands” – Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao. Those three stops are back to back and are bookended by two sea days. Today’s report is on the group of our sea days as we head toward Aruba.
As I mentioned in the Day 1 report, this particular cruise is packed with 6,423 passengers on board – a pretty hefty number – and on these two sea days, it’s definitely noticeable. With the weather being sunny and hot, the main Lido deck pook was particularly packed with no available lounge chairs in sight for the majority of the day with many guests getting up early to secure their spot for the day.
Up on the 21+ Serenity Deck, it wasn’t much different. The shady areas had no loungers available at all and most of the spots in the sun were also taken. On the last two cruises I was on, even on the hottest of days, there were still spots available on Serenity to chill in both the shaded and sunny areas.
Not so much on this cruise.
Peak times at the buffet saw moderate lines for the food stations, but there were still plenty of tables available for sitting down. Guy’s Burger Joint, however, is the hot spot at lunchtime. Walking through the area around 12:30 pm on the second day of the cruise, the entire queue area where you wait for your turn to order was full and the line extended well outside the bounds of the restaurant. By my estimation, there were about 200 people lined up for burgers and fries.
At the opposite end of the ship, there was a bit of a line for Shaq’s Big Chicken, a quick service spot serving up fried chicken sandwiches and tenders, but nothing like the line for Guy’s. Blue Iguana for tacos and burritos was just a short wait.
On the third day of the cruise, the lunchtime crowds were spread out a little more evenly and the line for Guy’s Burger Joint was not as bad, but it was still long.
While the ship is crowded, as I noted in my previous reviews of the Carnival Celebration, there are still plenty of loungers and chairs on the outside decks in less popular areas outside the Lido and Serenity Decks where you can lay out in both sun and shade, you just won’t be near the action – and for many, that’s totally fine.
Before getting into more food, specifically dinner, let me talk about my fellow passengers for a moment. Longer cruises typically attract families who are on vacation as opposed to a 3-day or 4-day weekend adventure designed to be nothing more than a booze cruise. This particular adventure has plenty of families and large groups of them. While there are a good number of kids on board, I found there to be more on my 7-day Eastern Caribbean cruise last month.
My oceanview stateroom on deck 5 has been proven to be fantastic in a couple of different ways. First, this stateroom is the same size as the neighboring balcony staterooms – 273 sq. ft. making it much more spacious than an inside stateroom. Second, location. With the hub of the ship’s activity spread across decks 6, 7, and 8 access is quick and easy. The only downside is it’s a long way up to deck 16 for the pool and Lido. Unlike my last cruise, I don’t have kids in the staterooms that border mine – so there’s been no noise coming from my neighbors and no kids slamming each other off the walls around the clock.
Dinner Time! Let’s start with the second night where I booked a reservation for Bonsai Teppanyaki. As I have mentioned in my previous reviews of both Carnival Celebration and Mardi Gras, the teppanyaki restaurant is the best value in specialty dining and in my opinion ranks higher than the ship’s steakhouse. I had a 9 pm reservation and we were all seated promptly. The food was fantastic, the service was great and my only negative had to do with my tablemates – they were BORING!
Since you’re at a shared table with the chef entertaining you as he/she prepares your food, you’re pretty much expected to have fun, right? Not my fellow diners. No matter how hard the chef tried to get people to smile, laugh, and have some of that fun, they were just plain dull. Perhaps it was too much sun, maybe they were tired, maybe it was just too late for them to enjoy dinner… whatever the case, I dined with a table of duds.
The third night had an interesting twist to it. For the free restaurants on board, you use the Carnival Hub app to “check-in” to the main dining room, the ship’s Italian restaurant, and the Chinese/Mexican mash-up, Chibang!. The app will provide you with an approximate wait time and will send a notification when your table is ready so you can enjoy other activities while you wait for your table. Unfortunately, the app suffered an outage at dinner time and was unavailable for about 45 minutes.
This resulted in people not being able to check in or even find out of their table was ready.
When the app did come back online, wait times for restaurants were running 60-100 minutes. I picked Chibang! which had the lowest wait time of 60 – 70 minutes and it took every bit of that hour for my table to be ready.
Once seated, I immediately ordered my dinner and a drink in order to cut down on any further wait time as it was already after 9 pm. In about 15 minutes, my server came over and said, “your entrees are out before your appetizers, do you want them now?” I politely declined and asked about my drink, which he said he forgot about.
Appetizers arrived about 10 minutes later and were hot. However, once those dishes were cleared, the main course was served and it was cold. The entrees that originally came out before the appetizers were simply set aside at the wait stand rather than returned to the kitchen. I ordered Singapore Chili Shrimp which consisted of the smallest salad shrimp the ocean could sustain in a spicy chili sauce along with Chicken en Mole, which I have had before and was very good.
The shrimp dish, with its extra tiny shrimp, was nothing more than “just OK,” while the Chicken en Mole, which has always been fork tender, was cold and tough.
The restaurant was packed and the wait staff was doing their best, but I chalk a lot of the issues up to the problem with the app that forced restaurants into serving a lot more people at one time than they normally do. Chibang! has always been good, so I’ll see if there are improvements as the week goes on.
Next stop is Aruba, so be sure to stay tuned for more updates.
FunTimes for July 16, 2023:
The FunTimes for July 16, 2023, is also available as a PDF.
FunTimes for July 17, 2023:
The FunTimes for July 17, 2023, is also available as a PDF.