Carnival's New Website Booking Format - A Walkthrough

[theosonthego]

Thank you for your help. I had a few questions and you were able to answer them with your tutorial. I am willing to try new things but sometimes I get stuck along the way and have to bail and try again after research. I just couldn't find anything on this new system so I was glad to see your post.

[Port of Tampa]

Wow thanks for putting that together. I will give it a go next time I book a cruise.

[Organized Chaos]

Wow thanks for putting that together. I will give it a go next time I book a cruise.

 

Thank you for your help. I had a few questions and you were able to answer them with your tutorial. I am willing to try new things but sometimes I get stuck along the way and have to bail and try again after research. I just couldn't find anything on this new system so I was glad to see your post.

Thank you, and you're quite welcome. I'm glad it helps. There's parts of the new format that could use some tweaking...things that aren't all that obvious when you're trying to make changes to a booking. All in all, I don't think it's terrible, just takes getting used to.

[13cheermom]

Thank-you so much for taking the time to post this. I tried clearing history today and didn't make a difference so was stuck using new format, lol. Your step by step instructions helped me through. :D Still prefer the old way better, seems like the new format takes longer, just hope it gets better as time goes on. Have a great day!

[Pellaz]

This was yeoman work. Great job on making something non-intuitive and user-unfriendly a little less daunting and unfriendly!

.

Then we would still be reading text-only, black-and-white websites, using the tab key to go from link to link. (Anyone else remember surfing the web using Lynx?)

 

Yep. And connecting via an acoustic 300-baud modem hooked up to our family's Atari 800. Had to put pillows around the acoustic couplers to reduce the room noise. Ahhh, the good ol' days!

 

These changes reflect changes in how your fellow website users use websites, increasingly with mobile devices. It is a shared space, and so things have to change so it works best for the most lucrative portion of the customer base. We've seen these changes applied to this cruise line's website as well as several other cruise lines' websites, and even to Cruise Critic itself.

Sadly, yes. I've grudgingly gotten used to the new look at CruiseCritic -- although it looks incredibly bland now -- and I suppose I'll have to get used to Carnival's new interface as well. But, as you stated, contemporary websites have to adapt so that mobile platforms and browsers can handle them, and these changes are a part of that.

[n6uqqq]

The new format seems to have glitches for sure. Tried booking for two in extended balcony for Nov next year on Miracle and said none available. Of course on the previous format there were plenty of extended balconies available. Carnival has their work cut out to get the new format functioning properly!

[Organized Chaos]

Unfortunately, there appears to have been some more recent changes since I created the walkthrough, so it may not be as accurate as it once was. I hadn't done a mock booking until today, so I didn't know. Back when I created this walkthrough, it asked me if I wanted to try the new format every time I went to the site. But I cleared Carnival's cookies in my browser tonight to test a few things out and now it won't even let me use the new format. Glitchy.

[n6uqqq]

Is anybody able to still get the old booking format? My daughter cleared my cookies and now I seem to be stuck with the new terrible format that is slow and a royal pain.

[LadyVolFan]

I like it. It upgraded me from a balcony to a suite at no additional charge. Of course, it took several tries to actually get the room booked. And then I had accidentally booked 2 rooms. And then I had to call when it wouldn't accept my credit card. And then the Carnival rep wouldn't honor the free upgrade on the phone. But I kept trying. After the fifth attempt it took my credit card and I have the suite booked at an awesome price. Yes, I was very aggravated. Yes, it actually took me a few hours of fighting the site and I would have given up, but the price for the suite was unbelievable so I kept trying. I received my confirmation and am ready to cruise.

 

Also, I use a wheelchair all the time and needed a handicapped accessible room. The new format allows for booking accessible rooms online, which I could not do before.

[Rosefloater]

Is anybody able to still get the old booking format? My daughter cleared my cookies and now I seem to be stuck with the new terrible format that is slow and a royal pain.

 

For some reason, we have the old format on our tablets and desktop computer.

[Dave0311]

For some reason, we have the old format on our tablets and desktop computer.

Same here. I saw this thread and was surprised it dated back to March. I've yet to see the new format over several computers. Lucky me I guess! ;p

[n6uqqq]

Same here. I saw this thread and was surprised it dated back to March. I've yet to see the new format over several computers. Lucky me I guess! ;p

 

Consider yourself fortunate! Luckily mine has reverted back. The new way is jumbled, hard to choose room options, and seems to be full of glitches and scripting errors. Cannot find extended balcony rooms for my next cruise on the Miracle Nov 4th 2018 on the new format. On the older one they are there and plentiful with cruise being 17 months away.

[mguimond1990]

Is anybody having issues adding guests names to the reservation. It allowed me to enter mine during the checkout process, but I have to go in and add the 2nd person in my group AFTER the booking process (seems weird) but when I do all I get is an error message that says "An unexpected response condition code has been received"...

[riffatsea]

Call the 800 number and tell the person you need to add another name.

You can either choose the option for tech help or just choose the option for a booking you already have.

Either way they can add the name and then send you a new confirmation e mail.

[Organized Chaos]

When I originally created my walkthrough, the new format had only been out for about a month, maybe less. A lot of people on here hadn't tried it yet, many weren't even given the option to try it. A majority who did didn't like it. But enough time has passed that it's kind of calmed down. Then, at some point when I wasn't looking, Carnival did a lot more tweaking to the booking engine and made the walkthrough pretty much useless. I'm not motivated enough to redo it. ;p I've messed around with mock bookings a time or two in recent weeks and, for me at least, it seems a lot more buggy now than when they first introduced the new format.

[BamaLady#13]

The problem that I am having is with the speed. The new site is sooooooo Sloooow and freezes. I just give up in frustration.

[bUU]

Of course, it isn't the website that freezes, but rather our browsers. I've noticed this on my older tablets and even one older laptop. Website designers occasionally get too aggressive taking advantage of advanced capabilities and it's too much for some of our older equipment. It's frustrating for them I'm sure but website developers really need to be aiming their websites for whatever equipment was top of the line five years ago, not for the equipment that is top of the line right now.

 

This message may have been entered using voice recognition. Please excuse any typos.

[Organized Chaos]

The problem that I am having is with the speed. The new site is sooooooo Sloooow and freezes. I just give up in frustration.

Same here, so I just did a little test. I use Firefox and I have several browser extensions running. Carnival booking is so slow & unresponsive that it's unbearable to use. So I just tried it using Google Chrome. I don't care for it so I rarely use it. I only have a couple extensions running on that. Booking was much faster & smoother. I thought maybe the Firefox extensions were to blame, so I ran Firefox in safe mode (no extensions, minimal plug-ins), but that didn't really help. Maybe slightly, but still a poor experience. There is such a thing as websites that play nice with one browser and not another, it definitely does happen. Don't know if that's the case here, we'd have to hear from others who try both.

[n6uqqq]

Same here, so I just did a little test. I use Firefox and I have several browser extensions running. Carnival booking is so slow & unresponsive that it's unbearable to use. So I just tried it using Google Chrome. I don't care for it so I rarely use it. I only have a couple extensions running on that. Booking was much faster & smoother. I thought maybe the Firefox extensions were to blame, so I ran Firefox in safe mode (no extensions, minimal plug-ins), but that didn't really help. Maybe slightly, but still a poor experience. There is such a thing as websites that play nice with one browser and not another, it definitely does happen. Don't know if that's the case here, we'd have to hear from others who try both.

 

I have trouble with firefox and IE. The part that would seem to be unrelated to browser is the fact that the new format is showing rooms unavailable in certain circumstances where on old format there were many rooms available.

[bUU]

That sounds exactly like yield management. It sounds like browser reported the results of affiliate marketing cookies and that was used to drive a different user experience. So the way you've described it is IE and Firefox that are working exactly as the cruise line intends and it is Chrome that is not working well.