dawyv

Didn't really take many pictures so this is an all-words write up. I apologize in advance if I slag on your favorite thing or compliment something you thought was the worst ever. :cool:

 

 

Getting There Isn't Half the Fun

 

 

 

My household use to live in north Texas so we'd just drive to Galveston for our cruising needs. Since moving to Seattle, we've flown into Dallas, met up with family, and then driven down. The last couple trips, we got wise and just flew into Houston so for this time, we decided to go "all-Carnival" and let Carnival be responsible for all legs of the trip. That was...unwise.

 

 

I booked the "shore excursion" of IAH to the pier on the day of our cruise. The airport Marriott lets us check out at noon so I picked a noon departure for the cruise shuttle. Carnival's instructions were quite clear, so we went to one of the baggage claim areas and met the person standing behind the colorful table at 11:50am. Turns out, at least according to the people manning the table, we should have been there 20 minutes earlier because the shuttle was about to leave us. On the other hand, how did they know that they had people left to come onboard the bus when they couldn't find our names in the system? After ten minutes of tinkering around on her tablet, one of the table agents found us and worked out how to get us logged in to board the bus.

 

 

Thus began what was supposed to be a 55 minute drive to Galveston taking over two hours. Part of that, I can't hang on Carnival. It was the first good summer weekend in the Gulf area so lots of people were headed to the beach. I get that. What I don't get was the driver's incessant need to keep bailing off of 45 onto the service road and waiting at lights in a vain attempt to gain time. At least twice, he exited the freeway to be confronted with a service road that ended, requiring us to backtrack a mile or two and get right back onto the congested freeway.

 

 

That wouldn't have been so bad except that we arrived at 2:15pm after luggage service had ended and were basically told to deal with it. Security grumbled at all of us for having "oversized bags" to run through and the check-in folks were irritated that we were "so late."

 

 

Check-In Process

 

Other than being unduly annoyed at something we couldn't control, the check-in process and people were great. I love the process of sending people straight upstairs for boarding if you've already entered your passport and credit card details. One benefit to getting there so late in the day is fewer people running around the terminal, which is nice.

 

 

Onboard

 

Carnival, I love your Conquest-class ships. They're the right size with the right passenger load, at least for my preferences. But, wow, Freedom is showing her age even post-refit. All five of the cabins in our travel party had some kind of annoying quirk with doors not closing tightly (the whistling of the wind going by at night was super fun), faucet handles being loose or poorly oriented (hard to tell where hot and cold actually are), hard to operate doors, half-working light fixtures, etc. Oh, and as per usual with us and Carnival, the cabins were warmer than expected but we were told that the AC was "working properly." Except, of course, for the night that a good chunk of deck 8 aft had no air conditioning...

 

 

Speaking of deck 8, I'll never let my family relation who booked this cruise be travel planner ever again. Being underneath the Lido buffet was good for finding out that there truly are worse upstairs neighbors than my old college apartment. All day and night chairs scraped the floors and people pounded or ran up and down the deck.

 

 

The HUB app is 85% of the way there. It's not bad, chat is still a pretty good deal at $5pp, but it's still rickety. Third cruise in a row, chat just refused to work on embarkation day, and several of us had to force quit the app and restart it on our various models of iPhones. Chat worked pretty well the other days but it gets very confused if you're in port yet staying on the ship and switching back and forth between cellular and ship connections. Freedom still lacks the Pixels Digital service so photos are physical copies. I'd buy more pictures if I could get the high resolution file directly.

 

 

Signage onboard has finally been updated to reflect a few years worth of changing up offerings and names and such. Still sad the Taste Bar is permanently gone.

 

 

 

Service

 

The service from everybody was still quite good. Guest services was helpful and (amazingly) the lines there moved quickly. Dining room maitre'd quickly switched one of our outlier cabins to be your-time dining along with the rest of us. Cabin stewards were efficient if looking a little bedraggled from overwork. My one quibble would be with the coffee bar. Only one person, who usually worked on deck 5, knew how to make a proper latte. The other deck 5 employee and the one who did the early morning coffee corner on deck 9 were both befuddled.

 

 

Ports

 

Our itinerary went to Cozumel, Belize, and Honduras. Sadly, Cozumel's port area is descending into Jamaica levels of "hey, come buy this!," "come check out my shop!," "great deals over here!" It's still worth getting off and doing a drive-around tour or going to your favorite beach spot but just wandering the port shops is higher-pressure-sales than it has been in the past. The tender to Belize is still wicked slow, amazingly hot (it's the Caribbean, after all), and winds up in Belize, my least favorite of the three ports. The last two "multi-stop see the city" tours we've done at Belize were poorly run, cramped, slow, and the tour operators cracked "jokes" about just leaving us behind unless we ("Praise Jesus") gave good reviews ("In Jesus' Name"). According to two of the people in our travel group, their tour was the same. Honduras is fun for the chair lift to the beach; I've not been on an excursion beyond the port just yet.

 

 

My Fellow Passengers

 

This will probably be the most controversial part of my little write-up: I'm clearly getting too old to cruise on Carnival (at least out of Galveston on a Caribbean cruise) because, for the first time ever, the whole ship was definitely "not my people." Loud, obnoxious, self-absorbed, and pushy were the norm. Speaking of first time for everything, not once or twice but three times, different people were jamming out to their own tunes with very loud large Bluetooth speakers either out on Lido or hanging out in the Casino corridor along deck 5. The third time, I said something to a nearby staff member (and I saw someone mention it to a Lido staffer once before) but was told nothing could be done. (I don't understand what it is about music + Bluetooth that makes people think "the 100 people nearest me must absolutely hear this.") Maybe at least my household should try the allegedly-more-sedate Alaska cruises out of our home Seattle port.

 

 

You Can Go Home Again, Eventually

 

I also booked us for the return "shore excursion" of the pier back to IAH. The instructions I got with the booking were to pay attention for a priority debarkation tag, go when called early, and under no circumstances be out there later than our departure time of 10am. Turns out, that's all crap. Shuttle transfers no longer use priority debarkation, shuttles go "whenever full," and you simply leave whenever your decks or tags are called.

 

 

Speaking of luggage tags, the new way of doing it where they drop a stand of tags out on deck at a specific time is madness. I watched three people simply grab a whole peg's worth of the tags from a handful of the earliest numbers, even though there were more than ten (maybe 20?) tags per number. We decided to do the self-assist part--that the cruise director was STRONGLY pushing--which worked as well as can be expected when you have two whole decks absolutely crammed with people rolling around all of their worldly possessions.

 

 

We still didn't get off until 10:15am but, fortunately, a shuttle was still there, the driver was still irked at us for "being late," but at least we didn't have to sit in traffic.

 

 

All in all, it was an OK cruise. I dunno how motivated I am to go on another, though we do have one booked on an 8-day in December 2019. I'll probably keep that itinerary since it goes to two ports we've never visited and a third we want to visit again, but maybe our next one will be on RCI or Holland out of the PNW.

 

 

Thanks for reading this far down. ;p

Straightforward enough question but I've been hard pressed to find the answer: Do all 8D-type balcony cabins have sofas, even if the cabin doesn't have the * on the deck plan? Or do only three-person cabins have them?

 

I'm going on a cruise with a bunch of family members and a couple of people who've cruised before have been in cabins that lacked sofas--just had a single chair--and said it was hard to congregate to hang out in the cabins. Therefore, I've been appointed to find out. :D

 

Thank you, kind CCers.

I would always choose Conquest class over the Dream class. There would have to be a big incentive for me to cruise Dream class again, like an itinerary I just cannot miss. If the Dream and Breeze had been my only experiences cruising, I do not think I would have cruised again. It was just longs weeks of dealing with people everywhere and waiting for everything.

 

This is exactly my experience. We've cruised on Breeze twice, once in October and another in January, and much prefer the Conquest-class ships. It feels like Breeze just added more staterooms without adding more public areas so there are more people in the same place. The outdoor BBQ and pasta restaurant (only ate it at lunch but it was good) were both nice but you can get BBQ on Freedom and maybe the pasta offering will be added in 2019. The "Easy, Breezy, 80s Cover Band" was awesome but they aren't a fixture of the ship.

 

 

I may have a little bias because Carnival Conquest was the first ship we ever sailed on out of Galveston but we gave Breeze a good go and just like the smaller ship better.

I took time to write this post on CC to warn others- based on OUR experience. There were many seated beside us with similar issues holding up their boarding- and if my posting helps even one person... it served its purpose.

But I wish I had not bothered and could remove my posts! It is not worth the condemnation. :mad:

 

I'm not replying to try to shame you or anything, just to point out that your experience differs dramatically from mine. I sailed on the Freedom out of Galveston on 6 January, returning on 13 January. At check-in, I presented my Enhanced Driver License issued by Washington State (and my son showed his Enhanced ID card, issued by the same state). They are distinguished from Washington State's "regular" cards by having a colored band across the top, the word "ENHANCED," and a US flag over one side of the picture with passport-style machine-readable data on the back. This is how Washington State describes an EDL or EID:

 

Get your EDL/EID

 

The enhanced driver license (EDL) or enhanced ID card (EID) confirms your identity and citizenship. It's an acceptable alternative to a passport for re-entry into the U.S. You can only use it when you cross borders by land or sea.

The Carnival agent noted the ID numbers on both cards and sent us on our way to the ship.

 

When we returned to Galveston and went through immigration, I gave my EDL to the border patrol officer. She looked at it, scanned it on the computer, and held it up to compare it to my face before I was admitted. This is the same process I've seen happen with my regular passport and my passport card when returning to the United States.

 

Where Carnival also err'd greatly was in refusing the Global Entry cards. GE cards can be used to enter the United States at sea ports, as documented by CBP's own rules:

 

Using Your Global Entry Card

We accept Global Entry cards for lawful U.S. entry at land and sea ports of entry.

 

You can't use a GE card at a GE kiosk, only when speaking directly with an officer, so most GE members don't bother carrying the card as a passport is primarily required. I suspect that the cause of the problem is that Carnival doesn't often see Global Entry cards because only one cruise port has Global Entry services on arrival (Fort Lauderdale, as I recall).

 

Since Carnival routinely sails to and from Canada and the Canadian Border Services Agency always has a setup for NEXUS, Carnival sees more NEXUS cards and has updated their procedures to account for them. (I noticed that Carnival accepted NEXUS card data when I checked in for that January cruise, though I chose not to use mine, figuring that Galveston immigration authorities might not have routinely seen them, either.)

Put them on just as you give them to the luggage porter at the cruise terminal. In Galveston, the curbside porters know the drill and have staplers handy for attaching the tags.

Another option, which does cost additional money but might be worth it to others as a backup, is to have a "backup" or secondary proof of citizenship that comes in a credit card-sized format. I live in Washington State and its Department of Licensing issues Enhanced driver license and ID cards to US citizens. It's mostly for crossing the border into Canada without being required to carry a passport but it also serves as proof of citizenship when entering the United States. Another option is the US passport card, which functions the same as an EID/EDL but any US citizen can get one, not just someone who lives in a state that issues "enhanced" cards.

 

A third choice is to join a so-called Trusted Traveler Program, like Global Entry ($100), SENTRI ($122, must live in a state that borders Mexico), or NEXUS ($50, must live in a state that borders Canada and be admissible to Canada). All three issue cards that are valid proof of citizenship and, unlike the passport card or EID/EDL, can be used in place of a passport to fly into the United States. (That said, if you are really stuck, the US consulate in the country where you missed your ship can get you a travel document or a letter authorizing an airline to carry you to the US without a passport and having another proof of citizenship greatly smooths this process.)

 

If you don't travel very much, the passport card is the cheapest and it's a useful form of picture ID elsewhere. I highly recommend at least getting it. Regardless of which you choose, you can leave your passport in the safe onboard and just carry a simple card with you.

On the 6 January sailing, the house band played some country music on deck 5 near the casino but I don't recall it anywhere else, not particularly in the Havana Bar either.

 

It is now a non-smoking venue (though all of the decor is still set up like a cigar lounge so that is incongruous). Beyond Latin music, the only organized activity I remember in there was the 18-and-over scavenger hunt game late one night.

Taste Bar was gone on Freedom on the 6 January sailing. The words "Taste Bar" were covered by tape on some of the deck maps in the elevator lobbies (but not all; guess they'd not got around to them yet).

 

It was interesting and a little nostalgic to read CruiseWithWife's review of a Thanksgiving sailing on Freedom and then remember "hey, wait a second, it wasn't open for mine at all" just a handful of weeks later.

1) Uber is $100-$150 to IAH, $75-$100 to HOU. I'd just buy the Carnival transfers.

 

2) If you have FTTF you'll probably be off of the ship by 9:30am. It's about two hours to IAH, hour and a half to HOU.

 

3) HOU is closest (south side of Gulf Freeway before 610) but has fewer destinations. Which airport you want depends on where you're going and what airline you're using.

 

IAH = Houston Intercontinental, "the big airport"

HOU = Hobby Airport

Hello everyone,

 

Going on our 2nd cruise on Conquest in March of '09. First was with Royal Carib. back in '06. This is our first time cruising w/ kids: DD who will be 9 by then and DS who will be 6.

 

We decided to book 2 interior 4d rooms numbers 6297 and 6295 on the UPPER DECK.

 

We did it to give us extra room to spread out and that we dont have to sit in the pitch black when the kids go to bed.

 

My only concern is that these rooms are right above the casino. I like being "sandwiched" between 2 passenger decks, but the Conquest layout makes that tough.

 

I have plenty of time to change back to a single room if I need to as of now so any input would be greatly appreciated!

 

I have tons of Camp Carnival and dining questions to come, but for now, I'd like to get this room thing settled.

 

Can you hear casino noise into the late evenings?

 

The casino isn't very loud, in my experience, especially at night when you'll be sleeping or relaxing in your cabin. Either way, I'd definitely be OK with being in a 4D above there. Frankly, it died down a lot earlier than I expected; there was usually only one roulette table open after 12A, which makes for a crowded table if several people want to play.

 

Camp Carnival is AWESOME. I realize you didn't ask any questions about it, but here's our experience: they are open from morning (times vary, as I recall) to ~2P, and then open for about 3 hours after that until about 5:30P when they get ready for dinner. Kids dinner seating starts at 6:45P they take the kids from there back to Camp Carnival (deck 12, forward).

 

Services are free until 10P, and then babysitting is available from 10P to 3A for $6/hour for the first child, and $4/hour for each additional child family member who stays. If your child is under 9 years old, they will give you a pager automatically so you can be reached anywhere on the ship. Your child can request that you be paged for any reason (to leave, just to chat, medical, etc). In our experience, our (then) 7 year old son paged us just once for something other than to leave, just to make sure it worked. Every other time, we either picked him up before "closing time," or he paged to depart. I highly recommend the pager! If your child has asthma, you can leave an inhaler, but they recommended against leaving any other medications. Also, if your child is 9+, they can sign themselves in and out of Camp Carnival.

 

They run activities, movies, have a sleeping area, crafts and so forth. There is a kids pool right near CC, but they don't take the kids to it, at least when we sailed. The kids dinner seating is great if your child doesn't want to go to the formal dinner in the dining room, and our having the late seating (8P) worked great. We'd drop our son off, have an hour to get ready for dinner, eat, then go see a show or gamble or just prowl the ship until he was ready to leave. (BTW: 24 hour room service is also great, since he could get a snack after leaving CC)

 

Camp Carnival is a little hard to get to. There is no direct elevator access to deck 12 forward from the main elevators. Go to the forward elevators (decks 1, 2, and 5 fully enclosed and allow you to go aft to forward with no obstructions) and take them to deck 11. Once you get off the elevators on 11, either take the forward stairs up to 12, or use the small elevator to your left. Camp Carnival is at the end of the only hallway on deck. (Conveniently located restrooms!) We kept forgetting that CC is all the way forward, so we'd wind up only being able to go to deck 10, then going outside (windy!) to cross over to the inside elevators.

 

(Oh, and before I'm raked over the coals for picking our kid up at 2-3A, I should mention that we're all three night owls, and he's home-schooled anyway, so the scheduling is a lot looser than most people's)