Carnival Cruise Lines Horrible Food, lines, not many shows RIPOFF Miami Florida

I had fabulous food at every meal, and never had to wait in line. The dining room does not require super dress- up clothes, and there, it was relaxed with attentive waiters delivering food. If you choose to wear flip flops and a bathing suit, then it could mean that you had to wait in a buffet line. There are thousands of people on the ship, and it is a lot easier to change your clothes a little then it is to get your own food.....some people really shouldn't travel because their expectations can never be met. WHY would you go on a cruise and eat fries and burgers? >

We have cruise on Carnival 5 times and we are in the process of booking our 6th cruise. There are going to be little problems with you are dealing with large numbers of people.  I don't think this couple would be very happily at the Ritz Carlton, and it would not surprise me if they are poor tippers.

FYI, one of the hot tubs is intended to be used by younger guests and the other (hot one) is for adults only.  It sounds like a lot of your complaints occurred because you were too lazy to do anything/find any info out yourself.  

I recently returned from a Carnival trip out of Miami (Valor) and can easily understand the posters comments and warn everyone that many of the people that post on these forums do so in the company polo shirts from the corporate offices even if they will not admit it...

On my trip, the service was excellent, the ship was clean - stewards top notch, etc ...  no complaints against the staff save for the chief who should be sent down...   Then again, I think the problem may be further up the food chain if you will pardon my pun...

The food was by far the worst I have ever had on any cruise or resort (about 50 cruises now and a lot of hotels...).  The sad thing is the wait staff and stewards really try to provided good service but what you are likely seeing is a culture of continuous cost cutting that has way crossed the line.  I would say these folks have become the Walmart of the cruise industry but the food at Walmart is actually better than most stores these days and I will not insult them with the comparison...  Perhaps Carnival should contract to them for the groceries...  Simple fact is that these ships are sailing with fewer people working food prep and using lots of canned/pre-packaged foods that they would have never used a couple of years ago.  Service is slower and food tastes worse than hotel banquette.  Options are fewer and obviously MUCH lower cost to the company. 

Can't help but wonder if shore side food prep is what nailed Princess in Ft Lauderdale a few weeks ago with the 'bug'...  Two ships out of the same port on the same weekend supplied by the same firms getting hit two weeks in a row...  possibly the food supplies?  Likely we will never know considering the rate those bugs move but something I hope they look into...  The crash in the food is one of the reasons

we stopped sailing Princess and they used to be really good back before the Carnval takeover.  Couple of years back we sailed Carnival Glory a few times and the food was DRASTICALLY better than what we just suffered. 

Simple fact is that my wife and I have never gone hungry on a cruise before and resorted to stashing fruit and cereal boxes in my cabin to eat for my dinner was depressing...  Some of the food was just tasteless/unpleasant and other tasted just plain wrong and sat like a brick for hours...  The breakfast was identical everyday (tasteless, greasy, no lox or anything you would normally expect at the breakfast) and after the third day, just could not stand it any more... Would it really cost them anything to change things up a little?  Wife spent the entire week eating from the fish and chips stand on deck 10 as that was all she could find...  I tried a lot of things before resorting to the last line...pool deck food... 

The burgers were ok if you could time it so you got a fresh one... (difficult unless you press on them to cook you one and wait) and the pizza just plain gross.  My high school was much better... First thing we ate after getting back was this simple little hole in the wall italian place.  Spent $25 with tip for two and had a meal that made the ship look like a bad joke.  Pizza that tasted like pizza and shrimp larger than a half inch long that tasted fresh.  Prehaps here lies a place they should hire the next corporate master chief!  be happy to post the phone number for them. 

In the main dining room, the main dishes were blah at best.  The few tasty items where on the appetizer list and you got about two bites for most of them.  All of our favorites, frog legs, meats, shrimp dishes...  blah.  Tasted boiled/canned...  Saw a lot of food going back on the plates and listened to one of our tour groups spend most of the trip to the beach bitching about the restaurant the night before.  Felt sorry for the wait staff as some people were making rather nasty comments and I felt their complaints were being unloaded on the wrong people.  Not like the waiters picked the menu...

As to the posters other comments on the entertainment... Also see 'cost cutting'. 

We had one decent comedian, one so-so and a couple of real losers (as in people sneaking out of a dead

quiet room).  The headliner singer was good and entertaining but did not sing all that much.. Spent most of his time playing with the audience... One good stage show for the week with the performers ok by current standards (would never have made the cut five years ago but they did ok)...  Other than that, the activities were unusually few and not well publicized. 

Most were not even in the daily schedule..  By 11, the ship rolled up the decks save for one musical couple and mostly dead clubs...  The movie screen up on the deck was even about to go out. Sections kept going dead or into weird colors... 

All in all, a good cruise if you wanted early bedtimes and to lose weight... :-)

In general, all of the lines are trying to squeeze like never before and it is going to cost them eventually but for now, they are keeping the prices low enough to bring in new people that have nothing to compare with at the cost of losing repeat cruisers.  I am sure that someone in the company did some math and decided these choices are the most profitable...  My family would go three times a year in the past, now we are down to once and after this trip, likely not on a Carnival brand again..  Took this trip with them for the route understanding some of the trade-offs vs other lines.

Sad what is likely going to happen to Costa this year as of all of the Carnival brands, they seem to be the only ones that actually cook real food anymore, rather than dump cans into steamers.  An Italian chief would kill himself before feeding guests what we just ate!  This chief (Indian, not that it maters) told the passengers in a cooking demonstration that all of his recipes come from corporate... some of the comments from the passengers were really 'cute'.  Of course he was demonstrating the food in the $30/plate dining room, NOT what the pesants had to eat.

And before you think it is just Carnival...  the other lines are just as bad but they cut corners in their own ways.  We took Carnival this time because we have no desire to EVER go to Jamaica again, are tired of the 'company ports' like Grand Turk and Ocho that are nothing but a cruise line owned strip mall and do not feel like getting mugged in Mexico which makes up the majority of routes on the other Florida departures.  So..  we traded ehhh food/entertainment for Going to Aruba and Curacao on a Florida based ship....  Good food and crumy stops on Royal Carib or going hungry and better stops on Carnival.. :-)

If you want to see things change, write the lines and stop sailing until they get the message.  I am looking into pulling my client group off of Carnival for the Spring as I do not want to put them through what I just suffered while spending major $$$ to do it...  Plan to discuss with them but doubt there is much they will have to say about it.  I am sure there are some laminated card responses waiting for me...  Real problem is the people that are making the decisions that are doing so much harm to this industry do not take those phone calls...

All things in due time and will just have to wait until they figure it out and sail with other companies until they do or perhaps just find another way to spend the vacation $$$.

I recently returned from a Carnival trip out of Miami (Valor) and can easily understand the posters comments and warn everyone that many of the people that post on these forums do so in the company polo shirts from the corporate offices even if they will not admit it...

On my trip, the service was excellent, the ship was clean - stewards top notch, etc ...  no complaints against the staff save for the chief who should be sent down...   Then again, I think the problem may be further up the food chain if you will pardon my pun...

The food was by far the worst I have ever had on any cruise or resort (about 50 cruises now and a lot of hotels...).  The sad thing is the wait staff and stewards really try to provided good service but what you are likely seeing is a culture of continuous cost cutting that has way crossed the line.  I would say these folks have become the Walmart of the cruise industry but the food at Walmart is actually better than most stores these days and I will not insult them with the comparison...  Perhaps Carnival should contract to them for the groceries...  Simple fact is that these ships are sailing with fewer people working food prep and using lots of canned/pre-packaged foods that they would have never used a couple of years ago.  Service is slower and food tastes worse than hotel banquette.  Options are fewer and obviously MUCH lower cost to the company. 

Can't help but wonder if shore side food prep is what nailed Princess in Ft Lauderdale a few weeks ago with the 'bug'...  Two ships out of the same port on the same weekend supplied by the same firms getting hit two weeks in a row...  possibly the food supplies?  Likely we will never know considering the rate those bugs move but something I hope they look into...  The crash in the food is one of the reasons we stopped sailing Princess and they used to be really good back before the Carnval takeover.  Couple of years back we sailed Carnival Glory a few times and the food was DRASTICALLY better than what we just suffered. 

Simple fact is that my wife and I have never gone hungry on a cruise before and resorted to stashing fruit and cereal boxes in my cabin to eat for my dinner was depressing...  Some of the food was just tasteless/unpleasant and other tasted just plain wrong and sat like a brick for hours...  The breakfast was identical everyday (tasteless, greasy, no lox or anything you would normally expect at the breakfast) and after the third day, just could not stand it any more... Would it really cost them anything to change things up a little?  Wife spent the entire week eating from the fish and chips stand on deck 10 as that was all she could find...  I tried a lot of things before resorting to the last line...pool deck food... 

The burgers were ok if you could time it so you got a fresh one... (difficult unless you press on them to cook you one and wait) and the pizza just plain gross.  My high school was much better... First thing we ate after getting back was this simple little hole in the wall italian place.  Spent $25 with tip for two and had a meal that made the ship look like a bad joke.  Pizza that tasted like pizza and shrimp larger than a half inch long that tasted fresh.  Prehaps here lies a place they should hire the next corporate master chief!  be happy to post the phone number for them. 

In the main dining room, the main dishes were blah at best.  The few tasty items where on the appetizer list and you got about two bites for most of them.  All of our favorites, frog legs, meats, shrimp dishes...  blah.  Tasted boiled/canned...  Saw a lot of food going back on the plates and listened to one of our tour groups spend most of the trip to the beach bitching about the restaurant the night before.  Felt sorry for the wait staff as some people were making rather nasty comments and I felt their complaints were being unloaded on the wrong people.  Not like the waiters picked the menu...

As to the posters other comments on the entertainment... Also see 'cost cutting'. 

We had one decent comedian, one so-so and a couple of real losers (as in people sneaking out of a dead quiet room).  The headliner singer was good and entertaining but did not sing all that much.. Spent most of his time playing with the audience... One good stage show for the week with the performers ok by current standards (would never have made the cut five years ago but they did ok)...  Other than that, the activities were unusually few and not well publicized. 

Most were not even in the daily schedule..  By 11, the ship rolled up the decks save for one musical couple and mostly dead clubs...  The movie screen up on the deck was even about to go out. Sections kept going dead or into weird colors... 

All in all, a good cruise if you wanted early bedtimes and to lose weight... :-)

In general, all of the lines are trying to squeeze like never before and it is going to cost them eventually but for now, they are keeping the prices low enough to bring in new people that have nothing to compare with at the cost of losing repeat cruisers.  I am sure that someone in the company did some math and decided these choices are the most profitable...  My family would go three times a year in the past, now we are down to once and after this trip, likely not on a Carnival brand again..  Took this trip with them for the route understanding some of the trade-offs vs other lines.

Sad what is likely going to happen to Costa this year as of all of the Carnival brands, they seem to be the only ones that actually cook real food anymore, rather than dump cans into steamers.  An Italian chief would kill himself before feeding guests what we just ate!  This chief (Indian, not that it maters) told the passengers in a cooking demonstration that all of his recipes come from corporate... some of the comments from the passengers were really 'cute'.  Of course he was demonstrating the food in the $30/plate dining room, NOT what the pesants had to eat.

And before you think it is just Carnival...  the other lines are just as bad but they cut corners in their own ways.  We took Carnival this time because we have no desire to EVER go to Jamaica again, are tired of the 'company ports' like Grand Turk and Ocho that are nothing but a cruise line owned strip mall and do not feel like getting mugged in Mexico which makes up the majority of routes on the other Florida departures.  So..  we traded ehhh food/entertainment for Going to Aruba and Curacao on a Florida based ship....  Good food and crumy stops on Royal Carib or going hungry and better stops on Carnival.. :-)

If you want to see things change, write the lines and stop sailing until they get the message.  I am looking into pulling my client group off of Carnival for the Spring as I do not want to put them through what I just suffered while spending major $$$ to do it...  Plan to discuss with them but doubt there is much they will have to say about it.  I am sure there are some laminated card responses waiting for me...  Real problem is the people that are making the decisions that are doing so much harm to this industry do not take those phone calls...

All things in due time and will just have to wait until they figure it out and sail with other companies until they do or perhaps just find another way to spend the vacation $$$.

My husband and I just came back from a 6 day cruise with Carnival on Friday Feb,102012. We had excellent service. The food was great, everyone was curteous and everyone seemed to just have a good time staff included. The dining area was great, Lido deck had great shows and wanted the guests to participate in a lot of things so that you wouldn't get bored. I won in the casino and I don't even gamble. I used my sign and sail card without incident. The cruise was booked for my husband's 40th birthday. The night of his birthday we went to dinner and our waiter came over and asked when was his birthday and I said tonight and he had everyone in the restaurant to sing Happy Birthday to him everyone was surprised including me because I had no clue anyone remembered. Needless to say I enjoyed my time with carnival so much so that I booked another cruise for next year before I left the ship. To the lady with the complaint you started your letter off by saying they were calling you before you had a chance to think if you wanted the cruise or not, if that was the case then you should have not even bothered. I enjoyed my time, I went in with an open mind and loved every minute of my stay.

I think the author of this complaint had unrealistic expectations. My wife and I have cruised twice on the Carnival line and they met our expectations. Carnival Cruise Lines have different "levels" of ships and the service and experience will vary slightly depending on what "level" you are on. Our second cruise ended today (12-11-09) out of Miami on the Carnival "Inspiration". This was a smaller ship than our first cruise which was on the Carnival Freedom. Our cruise on the Carnival Freedom seemed to run smoother with a higher quality of service (employees) than on the Carnival Inspiration. These were minor in scale, though. Both cruises met our expectations and I would recommend the Carnival Cruise Line to everyone.