CARNIVAL CRUISE LINES Ripoff Carnival Cruise Lines lures with lies of Paradise and provideds once your trapped a floating SLUM! Miami Florida

This was the letter written to Carnival Cruises the day after our return.

Carnival Cruise Lines 5/2006
Guest Relations Department,

I recently took a seven day cruise with a friend of mine on the Carnival Triumph from May 13th to May 20th. Our cabin number was 9264, the reference number to this letter is #001765321A.

I experienced one of the least pleasant vacations I have been on in all my life. The integrity of the staff members employed on your ship was appalling! The quality of the food was less than many fast food restaurants. During my dining experience alone, I could not help but note the following examples:

On the first day in the dining area, I unrolled my napkin to find a fork with two missing tines, and a spoon still crusted with remnants of someone else's meal. Throughout our cruise, it became obvious to us that finding any type of dinnerware that was not crusted with some type of previous meal was going to be hard to come by.

On the Lido Deck, I went to fill a cup of ice tea. Though the tea was lukewarm, I was more offended that my tea came spouting out of the bottom of my glass through a crude black hole burned in by a cigarette cherry.
Before our last day, I decided to fill out a comment card on the conditions of our dining experience so far. When I tried to drop it off in comment box, the lady at the purser's desk told me that there was no box, and she would take it for me instead. As I rode the elevator back up to my room, I watched her reading my card out loud at the counter to a fellow employee, with a sneer on her face as though she thought it was amusing.

The head chef called my room at 9:30pm to ask me what was wrong with her food. Though I explained this in my letter already, I told her simply that I felt the quality was poor. To be honest, the cucumbers were brown at every meal, the bread was often hard one minute after being taken out of the warmers, the selection for breakfast never changed in seven days, the meat was always chewy, items in the salad bar often went empty and I (as well as others) waited in line often up to 5+ minutes for them to be refilled, causing lines to slow, usually to a standstill. Often it was hard to tell the difference between lunch and dinner. The options were too redundant for a consecutive seven day cruise. Though we were not happy with the quality of the food, we were more than shocked when my friend poured curdled milk over her cereal twice, out of two different containers, on the last two days of our cruise!

The buffet dining room was unpleasant. The bus boys often cleared items before we had even finished them! It was apparent that the idea was not to enjoy our dinner, but to eat it quickly and make room for the next group of people. In the dining room our main course was served still frozen in the center. It was for this reason that we decided to eat in the buffet area instead. That lasted for three days until we moved our meals completely to our cabin to avoid the rushing of the staff and the odor of dirty mop water that always lingered in the food area. I was very concerned with the staff members attention to detail. The tables were cleared, but rarely wiped.

Too often, dirty plates lay on floors outside of cabin doors for hours. I watched a man spend over 60 minutes wiping the gold bars on the ceiling, while a child's drips and puddles of ice cream stay smeared on the floor for half a day. Lights were burnt out on some of the floor signals on the elevators. In one elevator, the light for deck six was out and the glass cracked and shifted out of its place. Ultimately, there seemed to be too many unsightly items giving the ship a very poor appearance. It was our impression, from the food served, to the dining arrangements, to the staff interactions, that the bare essentials were all that were intended.



When we arrived, our stateroom was missing all the beach towels, which we were almost charged for. We struggled to try convincing the employee who worked in our room that we had not taken them. Thankfully, she assured us that she would not bill us for the missing towels. Aside the small details like my balcony lights being burnt out for four days and the shower constantly fighting to drain, I was shocked that when I called the purser's desk to inquire why my wake up call didn't work, she told me there was no problem with it before. I was blown away by her attitude and implied accusation to begin with, but was beside myself completely when she finally came up to look at the problem and ordered a wakeup call over her two way radio when calling over the phone didn't work. To my horror, she then proceeded to tell me it was working fine! It became obvious to me that she was as unconcerned as the rest of the staff had been when it came to actually listening to what I was saying! Finally I told her that I was not longer interested in fixing the phone as long as she set my call for 7am. I just wanted her to leave. She was very terse and confrontational. I did not want to spend my last evening arguing with her. This was the standard attitude given with any complaint brought to the staff throughout my trip. It was fascinating that I called every night to manually set a wake up call, but they never came to look at the problem until the last evening we were there, after we had already gone to bed. I assume that this was because they seemed often short on staff. I waited on hold over ten minutes many times. Often our issues were dealt with late in the evening, or in some cases not at all.

One specific incident happened when we finally decided that we had enough of the binge drinking and lewd behavior by many of the male patrons aboard the cruise and went to our room to watch a pay-per-view movie. We paid an outrageous price of $9.00 to see Derailed, and frustratingly enough, Dreamer began to play instead. I called the purser's desk and told the woman the problem. She told me in a hurried voice while speaking to others at the same time about other affairs, that she would have someone look into it. For now, she instructed that we shut off the movie. So we sat in the silent cabin waiting.

I didn't get a call back from her for over ten minutes. Finally someone else called to ask again what movie I was trying to get, and which one I got instead. I had already explained this ten minutes prior. After repeating the same problem, she hung up and we waited again for over 50 minutes for a response. I ended up calling the desk back myself and asked if they knew when we were to expect a reply on the status of the movie. She told us it could be anywhere from 45 minutes to two more hours! I wondered at this point when she intended to tell us this.

Finally, she called us back hours later to tell us that Derailed was not going to be an option. At this time, I told her I was almost in tears over the service and overall experience I endured so far! She said she would log a complaint, but she could not do anything except tell us she was sorry.

Besides the outrageous behavior and standards set forth by Carnival Cruise Lines, our trip was less than half of what we had paid for. Our first port was still hurricane ravaged! It was an eyesore and not worth taking one picture of! If we had known the condition of the place Carnival picked to stop, we would have passed and picked another destination! For three days it rained. Our second port was cancelled completely. I was baffled that Carnival has no alternative to a cancelled itinerary other than another fun day at sea! These fun days seemed to only appealed to those who enjoyed binge drinking or chronic gambling, since there were no other activities planned for port cancellations.

I understand that many of these conditions are not in your control. For the sake of stating my dissatisfaction at the trip in general I felt that this should be noted.

There are too many other things to note that were not as devastating as the spoiled chunks of milk over breakfast. Items such as burnt espresso and milk prepared by someone who did not even work at the coffee shop, but was standing in because they ran out of supplies, dirty napkins, cancelled shows, three movies on a constant loop for a seven day cruise, a leaking roof by our main hall entry that was never attended to, drinks priced higher than our previous Royal Caribbean cruise, intolerable food, inattentive staff, constantly empty cone stations, broken handles on ice cream machines, and overall the unsanitary conditions.

I assure you that I am not generally a very picky person. I went on acruise two years ago and was so impressed I booked another cruise this year. I had no idea that there was such a difference between two cruise lines! The experience my friend and I endured through our seven days on Carnival Cruise Lines was unacceptable, and in many cases inexcusable.

I would appreciate for Carnival Cruise Lines to assure this matter be handled swiftly and without need for further pursuit. However, I am very willing at this point to invite legal aid simply under the suspicion of unsanitary food preparation and storage. I am hoping that you will also take this letter as an opportunity to inspect and improve not only the conditions causing spoilage of your food, but the morale within the body of your staff.

I am requesting a full refund for Anne Bonner and myself for the purchased price of our stay with Carnival Cruise Lines. I expect this at the very least. Currently, I cannot say that I will return to Carnival Cruise or recommend Carnival Cruise Lines through my business.

Birdie
Minneapolis, Minnesota
U.S.A.

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