Nick’s latest “free” Carnival cruise: a mixed bag

As this post publishes, I’ll be disembarking the Carnival Venezia, which I boarded in New York City 11 nights ago. After cruising once in my life prior to 2022, I have now taken 6 cruises in the past 18 months, spending 55 nights at sea (and I’m not done cruising in 2024!). I didn’t sit down intending to write a full ship review, but rather hoped to summarize my thoughts on the positives and negatives of my most recent Carnival cruise experience. Somehow, this post still became far longer than I intended, but in summary I didn’t love this specific cruise and it made me re-think my strategy for future cruises.

Casino status matching for the win

Before I get into the details of this cruise, I would be remiss not to mention the extensive casino status matching that has made much of this possible. If you haven’t followed along with that, you’ll want to see the post How to get free cruises by gaming casino status matches, which I intend to fully update and republish within the coming days. The short story is that it is possible to get quite a few free cruises by matching status first from Wyndham to Caesars and on to other programs.

That has been a huge win. If we had paid the retail price of the six cruises we’ve taken, we would easily be north of $20,000 into cruises in the past 18 months. Instead, the most we’ve spent on one of these cruises was a little shy of $2,000 (which was because of the high port taxes on our Holland America Alaska cruise and the fact that we paid for an upgrade to a balcony cabin on that cruise, whereas we got a complimentary balcony or ocean view on most of the others).

While I wouldn’t call myself a big fan of cruising, I have come to understand and appreciate the pluses, particularly for those of us traveling with young kids.

I have particularly enjoyed the balance we’ve found in making a cruise something of a workation. Cruise Wi-Fi has come a long way over these past few years (which I’ll cover separately) and that has made it far easier for remote workers like me to bring the job on the seas.

I think the cruise matching has been well worth it for a nice break from our routines and travel norms (and certainly a nice break from the bad weather that’s hit the Northeast in recent days).

That said, we haven’t necessarily loved every minute of every cruise. Our current Carnival cruise has been a mixed bag with some lessons for us about what we’d think about differently in the future.

I booked this cruise via a “free” offer I’ve gotten since our previous free Carnival cruise

We started our run of casino status matching cruises in October 2022 with a free Carnival cruise in Europe in a balcony cabin via the Carnival Fun Match. I played some blackjack and poker on that cruise — apparently enough to keep Carnival somewhat (though not very) interested in me. I’ve been getting offers to book “free” interior rooms on up to 3 future cruises ever since shortly after that cruise.

I wanted to try out a newer Carnival ship since our previous “free” Carnival cruise was on an older ship in Europe. When I saw an 11-night itinerary out of New York on the Carnival Venezia, one of Carnival’s newest ships (it debuted in 2019 in Shanghai sailing for Costa and was refurbished and semi re-branded as a Carnival ship in 2023), I decided that I wanted to give it a shot. My wife wasn’t particularly enthused by the prospect of spending 3 days at sea on the way to the Caribbean (and two days at sea on the way back), nor sailing in an interior cabin, but we decided to give it a shot nonetheless.

We paid about $1,400 for our “free” cruise in an interior cabin and we got a $200 onboard credit. While the cruise fare itself was only $100 each for my wife and I (which we got back as $100 each in onboard credit), we had to pay $279 for each of our two kids + port taxes for all four of us. The port taxes came to around $800 and the fare for the kids brought us up to around $1400.

However, at the time that we booked, I was able to take advantage of an Amex Offer to get 25,000 Amex Membership Rewards points with a purchase of $1,000 or more at Carnival. Even at just the 1.1c per point that we could get redeeming points for a Schwab brokerage deposit with the Schwab Platinum card, that’s $275 worth of points (our Reasonable Redemption Value of 1.55c per point puts the value around $387.50, though I expect we’ll get even more value out of the points in the long run). That helped mitigate some of the cost.

The Pluses

Decent port stops

We didn’t at all prioritize “doing” much at the port stops on this cruise; I was more interested in checking out the newer ship to compare against other ships we’ve sailed and taking the chance to escape the extended Northeast winter was enough draw for me that I couldn’t even remember the port stops before we boarded.

That said, I enjoyed the port stops on this cruise well enough. We cruised to St Thomas, St Maarten, San Juan (Puerto Rico), Amber Cove (Dominican Republic), and Grand Turk (Turks and Caicos). We found the stops enjoyable and easy to navigate without having to venture far from the cruise ports.

The favorite stop for most of my family was easily Grand Turk. We must go back to Turks and Caicos. I can not overstate my regret over not having booked one of the Small Luxury Hotels properties there through Hyatt before the announced end of that partnership. I would be thrilled if I end up being able to book one of the SLH properties with Hilton free night certificates or if one of the Mr and Mrs Smith properties there becomes bookable for a reasonable number of Hyatt points. I’ve not seen a beach so gorgeously beautiful located directly in front of a cruise port. I need to get back and explore more.

Internet access was awesome (but really expensive)

Most cruise lines are using Starlink Internet these days (which is owned by SpaceX). It works really, really well (at least on the premium package). It obviously isn’t as fast as fiberoptics on land, but I was getting 100+ Mbps down and 15 to 35Mbps up for the most part. I recorded our last two full-length Frequent Miler on the Air podcasts, most recent Coffee Break, and Ask Us Anything from the cruise ship WiFi somewhere out in the ocean and it worked well. I had no trouble hot spotting off of my phone to get my laptop connected (though Carnival allows you to switch devices, so that isn’t necessary unless you want both devices connected at once).

Again, I purchased the premium package. It wasn’t cheap, ringing in at around $230 per device for the full cruise for the premium plan that included the ability to stream / make video calls. There was a package that included full Internet but not streaming that was about $1.50 per day less expensive (a difference of less than $20 over the course of the 11-night cruise) and a social media-only package (that included Facebook/Instagram/X  that was around $170 for the 11 nights. My mother-in-law got the social media-only package and had no trouble playing videos on Facebook, but that package didn’t include access to other websites.

For what it’s worth, the Internet access was cheaper on my recent MSC cruise (and they are also using Starlink), but they didn’t allow switching devices. You had to buy an Internet package for each device (or hotspot, which is what I did).

Dining room service was reasonably quick!

One thing we’ve really hated about most cruises we’ve taken has been the incredibly slow service in the main dining rooms. We had come to the conclusion that cruise ship main dining room service just doesn’t fit the pace we need with our kids. At ages 6 and 3, they don’t have a two-hour sit-down dining experience in them (and the food hasn’t been good enough on any of our cruises to want to fight that losing battle).

However, this time we gave it a shot on the first night and we were pleasantly surprised. We ended up eating dinner in the main dining room more often than not and my six year old became comfortable ordering for himself by the end of the cruise. We were out of the dining room in just about an hour each night, even with an appetizer, main course, and dessert. We did “anytime” dining and simply checked in using the Carnival Hub app right around the start of dinner at 5pm (5:30pm at the latest). Maybe it would have been slower later, but the timing worked out really well in our experiences.

The Carnival Hub app is quite good

Carnival does a really good job with its app in comparison to other cruise lines we’ve been on. It is pretty intuitive to use and see what’s going on almost all the time. Weather is right on the home page when you pull up the app. It’s easy to make dining reservations or to check in for “anytime” dining and get a push notification when your table is ready. That was super convenient. I don’t think I’d pick an assigned dining time on Carnival on a future cruise since that was so easy in the app.

The kids’ club activities were more buried — we probably missed stuff that was going on in the kids club because we didn’t find it in the app until near the end of the cruise.

Oddly, the casino hours weren’t always accurate. The app said that the casino was closed during the last two days of the cruise, but it wasn’t. However, you can see stuff like your player bank and casino points right in the app.

Food was decent and there was just enough variety

After our last Carnival cruise, I compared the food to eating at Applebee’s, saying that it certainly isn’t gourmet and isn’t what I would want every night all year long, but I could almost always find something that I liked well enough.

That was mostly true on this cruise as well. I had a couple of dishes that I actually found to be not just “okay” but actually pretty good. I particularly enjoyed a couple of the Indian vegetarian dishes on the menu. Those dishes might not catch your eye since Venezia is Italian-themed (the restaurant has a gondola in the center of it), but given that plenty of staff come from Asia, I figured that ordering the Indian vegetarian dishes might not be a bad bet and I wasn’t wrong. My wife ordered a couple of Indian dishes as well and was very pleased with them.

I should note that we did not eat at any of the specialty restaurants. There were a number of them and we intended to try the teppanyaki restaurant at some point and just never got around to it.

In terms of complimentary dining, apart from the main dining room, there was pizza until 4am (thin crust, Italian-style approximately personal sized), the buffet, and during the day there was a complimentary Guy Fieri-themed burger joint (which was decent if not great, but the lines were often outrageous on sea days) and “Tomodoro”, a burrito/taco joint that I thought was tasty enough and probably somewhere between Moe’s and Chipotle. The line for the “deli”, which had things like meatball subs, cheesesteaks, Reubens, and that sort of thing, was so long almost all the time that I only ended up getting something there twice. The meatball sandwich was probably roughly on par with Subway. The cheesesteak was better, but no South Street Philly competitor.

Breakfast was very repetitive. I was surprised to see different forms of Eggs Benedict on the buffet pretty regularly, but as a non-egg-eater, there wasn’t a ton to get excited about. That said, most people would probably be fairly satisfied (and don’t forget that the burrito joint does breakfast burritos).

The chocolate chip cookies on the buffet / late-night stacks are something I’ll miss.

The casino was good to me

I got pretty lucky on this cruise.

I don’t usually play slot machines. However, on the first day, I loaded a slot machine. I’ve come to enjoy the fact that you can load a slot machine and charge it to your room folio on many cruise lines. That works out pretty well if you’re buying Carnival gift cards at 10% off from AARP to pay your folio. This cruise was particularly nice in that cash you’d loaded to your card at a slot machine could be easily withdrawn at a kiosk whenever you wanted rather than having to wait in line at the cashier. So I loaded a slot machine on Day 1 and intended to give it a few spins just to get a little action in on my players card. On the 9th spin, I hit for $1012.20! I couldn’t believe it — like I said, I don’t typically play slots and I don’t think I’ve ever won more than 10 or 20 bucks on a slot machine. I just sat there dumfounded as the thing kept counting up.

Towards the end of the cruise, I finished recording a podcast episode with Greg and did a couple of things in my cabin and then went passing through the casino looking to check on the hours for the last couple of days of the cruise so I could be sure to cash out what was on my card. I had my laptop in hand and was passing through to find a place to sit and do some work and as I stepped into the casino, I hear, “Nicholas, you have 25 seconds left to come forward and claim your prize”. At that point, I was about 15 feet from the casino host and closing in to ask about the hours, so I said, “Nicholas, who?”. Imagine my disbelief…..

That was $100 in “free play”, which I could have taken loaded to my players card or in funny-money chips for table games (I took the latter and only ended up with $50 to show for it, but I won’t complain!). I played a little bit in between (and even met a blog reader named Jay at the blackjack table one day — Hi, Jay!). Overall, I left the cruise with more money than I started with, so that part was fun!

I should also note that this cruise had a nonsmoking casino room, and that’s where I played. The main casino was so smoky that not only did my wife complain about her hair smelling like smoke just from walking through the casino, but one night I overheard another woman complaining of the same — that she had merely walked through the casino and her freshly-washed hair smelled like smoke. If you’re a smoker, that obviously isn’t a problem. If you’re not, it is unpleasant…but the nonsmoking room was an unexpected bonus!

The Medical team did a good job

I forgot to include this when I first wrote this post, but I’m updating to add one more piece: I was happy with the onboard medical center and with Carnival’s response when one of my kids got hurt.

I was in our cabin working when this happened, but on the first day (before we’d even left New York!) the rest of my family was exiting an elevator and as the door opened, my 3yr old got his hand caught in the opening elevator door (like where the door goes into the wall as it opens). It wasn’t a small “stuck” — my wife couldn’t get it out. Of course he was screaming and she was yelling for help. Apparently a couple of guys who had just gotten off the elevator heard my wife calling for help and together they were able to pry the door apart enough to get my son’s hand back out.

Luckily, he just ended up with some cuts and bruises — nothing major. In the immediate moment, with the way he was crying, my wife was concerned that maybe he broke something, so we ended up in the medical center. The staff there was excellent with him and helped calm him and get some ice on his hand. An x-ray ultimately wasn’t necessary, but apparently they have the equipment on board to do one if necessary. The room in which we were seen looked just like a standard doctor’s visit room. I’m not shocked about that, but this was (thankfully!) the first time we’d seen a ship medical center. The doctor recommended ibuprofen, which we had but was in our (as yet undelivered) checked baggage, so she said we could alternatively buy it from the medical center. I didn’t even ask how much it would be (it didn’t matter), but I was pleasantly surprised when we ultimately weren’t charged for it.

This ended up taking a couple of hours in total because after he was seen, we had to fill out incident report paperwork and meet with someone from security, who took us to the elevator so my wife could be exact about which elevator it was and they could inspect it.

Over the next couple of days, staff left us a letter saying that they hoped he was feeling better and they followed up via phone to check on him. It’s easy to say that they were just trying to make sure we weren’t going to sue them, but even if that was their primary motivator, checking up was the right thing to do.

The Minuses

Too many days at sea / not enough to do

We feared that 3 days at sea to start the cruise and 2 days at sea on the tail end of the cruise might be too many days at sea. I had hoped that there was so much to do on a newer ship like Venezia that we wouldn’t get bored. I was wrong. We got really bored.

Part of the problem here is that Carnival just hasn’t made an effort to create much to do.

That’s not to say that there isn’t anything to do. There’s a ropes course and that was fun (my six year old loved it).

The waterslides were surprisingly not so great though — my six year old couldn’t get up enough speed to slide down the one he was tall enough to take (and I couldn’t, either). He ended up having to inch himself along down the whole thing (I also tried that slide and had the same problem). Our 3yr old wasn’t big enough for the slides.

There was a splash pad, but it was really small compared to those on other cruises we’ve taken (and it was too cold for outdoor stuff during the first couple of days and the last day of the cruise).

Onboard activities were mostly trivia or opportunities to buy stuff. I’m not taking a cruise to buy a watch or artwork, so a lot of that stuff just didn’t appeal to me at all. The ropes course closed about halfway through the first of the two sea days heading back to New York (winds were too high). There were a couple of kids club activities that my older son enjoyed, but overall we kind of ran out of stuff to do. I will say that it was nice that they had boardgames and bocce ball. My kids learned to play Clue, Candyland, and bocce ball.

An interior cabin isn’t our jam

I’m sure that more experienced cruisers probably chuckle at the header here, but we didn’t love being in an interior cabin. Luckily, my wife’s mother decided to join us on this cruise and one of our kids ended up sharing her cabin the whole time. Thank goodness for that, because four of us in one interior cabin would have gotten tight. The cabin felt small and if we had brought down the bunk beds from the ceiling, I imagine it would have felt more cramped yet. Given that our kids are at a very loud age, the interior cabin would have meant too little escape from the noise. I’m glad we didn’t end up with all four of us in it. I’m not sure we’d plan a cruise with all four of us in an interior cabin again any time soon.

It was a bit too crowded (but we cruised during a holiday period)

This was surely a function of cruising over the Easter holiday period, but this cruise was crowded. I’d give a second thought to cruising with Carnival during a holiday week again. Lines were long for almost everything. As noted above, I only ate at the deli (despite liking it) twice over an 11-night cruise because the line was just ridiculous all the time.

But the crowdedness also seemed to be a function of some sort of poor design. The buffet is sort of laid out in a confusing way and I often found that there were lines a mile long at three sections of the buffet, while a fourth section, which had identical items, would have zero line at all (I was surprised that more people didn’t check both sides before getting on line?). I also found it frustrating that entire sections of the buffet were often closed, which made lines at the open sections longer. Also, while most sections of the buffet had the same stuff, there was a section at the back of the ship that had fruit and pastries at breakfast (for example) that you couldn’t get anywhere else on the buffet. It wasn’t very intuitive.

I assume that part of the difficulty from an activity standpoint is that there just wasn’t enough space for any activity that might attract a crowd.

More “party” atmosphere than fits our interests

I think the common image of Carnival is that it’s a “booze cruise” type atmosphere. I’ve always imagined that reputation comes from shorter 4 or 5-night Caribbean itineraries that are short enough to be fairly inexpensive (both for the cost of a cabin and the cost of a drink package), which I expect draws a crowd mostly interested in partying.

Our European cruise with Carnival didn’t fit that mental image (which didn’t surprise me).

This cruise had a bit more of a party atmosphere than I might have expected given the length and the way that Carnival seems to market to families more than other cruise lines. That said, in hindsight, with 5 days at sea and 5 port stops, I probably shouldn’t have been surprised that partying on the boat was a larger focus on this ship than on the MSC cruise we took a month prior where port stops were often something like 8am to 8 or 10pm. Folks were obviously on vacation, so that makes sense.

I would still cruise with Carnival again, but I think I enjoy the more European feel of MSC (though Carnival had MSC beat from a food and service standpoint).

Expenses can add up

A common complaint I’ve heard about Carnival is that they “constantly nickel and dime you” for everything. On the one hand, I get this complaint — most activities were focused on ways to help you spend money. And there were ways in which that got annoying. For example, when we stopped at Amber Cay, which is sort of like Carnival’s equivalent of a private island (but in the Dominican Republic), food and drinks were not included (and were pretty expensive — a single hot dog was $13, though it came with fries and a lemonade or soda). By contrast, when we cruised with Royal Caribbean and stopped at their private island (Perfect Day at Coco Cay), there were food outlets that were complimentary (and if you had a drink package, I believe alcohol was also included). Lunch that day cost us a bundle for hot dogs, French Fries, and lemonade.

Oddly though, I was a little surprised that Carnival is missing some easy revenue opportunities. We did eat dinner at the buffet at least one or two times and we ate breakfast and lunch in the buffet area most days. A few times, I’d have probably bought a Pepsi to go with my pizza or something like a smoothie at breakfast, but there wasn’t a place to get anything like that inside the buffet. It wasn’t really a long walk to get outside the buffet to a bar — but then the main bar nearby was all the way at the back end of the buffet and outside (and at least a couple of days, it was chilly out there to be standing around!). I probably would have spent a few more bucks on drinks if it were easier.

The situation in the casino was similar. There was no bar in the casino and I think I saw a waiter taking drink orders twice in the nonsmoking casino room. Granted, I was on a casino offer that included complimentary drinks while playing in the casino, but for people who weren’t it was harder to get a drink than I’d have expected.

Entertainment quality was poor

It’s unfortunate to say this because I know that Carnival’s entertainers were putting in full effort and they are far more talented than I am, but to say that the entertainment on this cruise compared to entertainment on our MSC cruises was like night and day would feel like a very large understatement.

The one main theater show that I sat through in its entirety was flat out rough. The people next to me seemed to not think more highly of it than I did and as I was sitting in the atrium while the theater was still letting out, I overheard one woman say to the person next to her “That was bad. That was really bad.”

There were a few standout performers on the cruise. A duo simply called Missy and Gabe played in the main atrium area almost every night and were impressively good for a low-key duo (I can not imagine why Carnival didn’t have “Missy” singing in its main stage shows because she was an excellent singer!). And the Venezia Big Band / Rock Band had some good musicians. But on an 11-night cruise that is going to put the same performers on night after night, I think Carnival really needs to take a closer look at its entertainment offerings. Like I said, entertainment was such a noticeable step down from MSC that it was just really disappointing in many cases.

And there wasn’t really a main theater show every night — some nights just had comedians. That was kind of disappointing.

Overall thoughts

Now that we have (almost) exhausted the easier “free” cruise options, I imagine we’ll take far fewer cruises in the coming years. At the same time, I don’t think we’re done cruising. I think we’ve come to appreciate enough about them that I wouldn’t count out paying for a cruise at some point (and we do have one more “free” cruise booked this year so far). But I think that as we get more experience under our belts, our approach is likely to continue to adjust a bit.

Personally, I wouldn’t plan another cruise with so many sea days. I’d thought that maybe a repositioning cruise would be fun since there is a lot to do on the ship, but I no longer think I’d do that. It’s easy to run out of stuff to do — and while I’d have long said that you “don’t really feel the motion” on a large cruise ship, I definitely wouldn’t say that anymore. We felt plenty of motion on this one, which I think is common in open seas. We were all fine with Dramamine, but I wouldn’t plan another long cruise with a ton of “at sea” time.

I would also prioritize finding a ship that is known for good entertainment and/or activities. In some cases, that’ll be because of ship features (one of the Royal Caribbean ships we took had both a wave simulator for surfing and an ice rink among many other things!), but in other cases it will be because of the cruise lines focuses (MSC’s entertainment or Holland America’s interesting educational talks).

Our first couple of cruises, we made choices mostly based on port stops. Our last couple, we chose primarily based on the ships. In the future, I’d probably prioritize both aspects, but with a lean toward the port stops. The MSC Orchestra, which we cruised in Europe, was probably our least favorite ship so far, but we keep talking about how fantastic the stops were. And we won’t soon forget that beach on Grand Turk this past week. I think having stuff to do on the ship matters, but I think our first instinct to choose based on where we want to go makes sense for us.

Finally, I probably wouldn’t cruise out of New York during cold weather months again. Days at the front and tail end of the cruise were too chilly to enjoy some of the ship’s amenities.

Carnival may get me back again to check out another cruise. I actually wouldn’t mind giving them a shot in Australia, though that will be a bit of a bigger trip planning process, so it probably won’t be in the very near future. However, this summer, we’ll give MSC another chance in Europe. And if the new Wynn match in Las Vegas works out, maybe we’ll be on board again with Holland America before this year is through.

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