Back from 2 Jun - 9 Jun Freedom sailing

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

Thanks for an honest review of your experiences.

We are also flying into IAH for our Freedom cruise in September and your review particularly of the Carnival shuttle experience just confirmed our decision to go ahead and rent a car was the right way to go. I was particularly concerned about the shuttle back to the airport since our flight leaves at 12:30.

Galveston use to be my homeport when we lived in Dallas, but now that we're in Oklahoma the road trip is just too much of a hassle and I think Galveston is one of the hardest embarkation ports to get to if you're flying in and don't have a car. So sadly this will probably be my last cruise from there.

I would like for you to tell me about your experience with using the airport Hilton. We are staying there for the first time and know nothing about it. Was it easy to get to? What about restaurants. We'll be going back to the concourse to pick up our rental car at 8am on embarkation day and don't know whether to drag our bags back down there or just have me go get the car then circle back to the hotel to pick up my sister.

enjoyed the review.thanks

Thanks for the review.