Gimme your CCL pet peeves

[carohs]

On 10/21/2023 at 9:03 AM, rainbowflag said:

the FunFetti cheesecake served on embark day in the lido buffet on some, but not all, Carnival ships has a center layer of real cheesecake that has an exceptional sugary goodness to it

Nope. Still bad. Even the funfetti is still a cloyingly sweet cake. The teeniest amount of cheesecake doesn't make up of the effort to get to it. Or the amount of wasted cake I won't eat. 

 

Besides the smoking smells being unavoidable and poorly placed smoking sections imo, my other pet peeve is all desserts seem to be cake. For someone who doesn't like cakes it can be difficult to find a dessert to enjoy. 

[mamiamjo]

4 hours ago, carohs said:

Nope. Still bad. Even the funfetti is still a cloyingly sweet cake. The teeniest amount of cheesecake doesn't make up of the effort to get to it. Or the amount of wasted cake I won't eat. 

 

Besides the smoking smells being unavoidable and poorly placed smoking sections imo, my other pet peeve is all desserts seem to be cake. For someone who doesn't like cakes it can be difficult to find a dessert to enjoy. 

I'm with you. I don't care for cake very much at all. Other than ice cream occasionally, I end up just skipping the dessert. It'd be nice to see some better/different options.

[simplelife]

I don't  care for Carnival's cakes much. They look better than they taste, Last cruise they a few good alternatives, They had my favorite dessert, Bitter & Blanc, one night. Peach Pie was offered another night, and creme brulee another . 

[simplelife]

On 10/18/2023 at 9:33 PM, Saint Greg said:

100 people standing around blocking the dining room entrance, blocking the elevators, and sitting on the stairs waiting for the app to assign their table.

 

This happened the first night of our last cruise, because the Hub app made it sound like you should request a table and one would be assigned within 10 minutes, so people came down early.  But the hostess did a good job of explaining that you should request a table, and they would message you when it was ready and you then had up to 10 minutes to arrive and claim it, so the crowds thinned out after that.

Edited October 30, 2023 by simplelife

[simplelife]

On 10/11/2023 at 1:43 AM, icft said:

We resisted, but finally caved. One of the things we enjoyed about cruising was putting our phones in the safe and being away from the rest of the world for a week with only our sign and sail cards to keep up with. Alas, another of the joys of cruising that have disappeared.

Now we just put them on airplane mode and only use then for the Carnival Hub and taking pictured/ We are still "unplugged" for the duration of the cruise

[simplelife]

On 10/14/2023 at 8:30 PM, Drew B 58 said:

Perhaps that’s the case in the fixed-time dining room.  In the my-time dining room, all of the tables are getting their main courses at different times, so the show could happen at any point in the service…

One reason I prefer fixed dining

[simplelife]

On 10/15/2023 at 12:22 PM, icft said:

Back to pet peeves; the toilet paper. We now have toilet paper on our trip check list of things to bring. I really should swap rolls with them and bring back theirs to use as finishing sandpaper on furniture projects.

Most commercial brands of toilet paper can clog the plumbing and create a real problem for not only you but other passengers as well

[simplelife]

On 10/15/2023 at 10:27 PM, Drew B 58 said:

Yes, they give you those.  A lot of people, though, choose to use them in the shower and then there isn’t another by the sink.

ask your steward for additional bars

[simplelife]

On 10/15/2023 at 3:51 PM, Kermarkim said:

Comedians who don’t know how to be funny for the early showtimes.  Based on my last 4 cruises, it is apparent that these comedians only know how to perform in the 18+ shows:  However, they are under contract to also do family sets but most are not up to the task.

I find that if they are not funny for the "family" shows they are really not very funny for the adult shows either. 

[simplelife]

On 10/20/2023 at 10:31 AM, davy jones said:

My theory is that they use minimal amounts of sugar to keep costs low.  Bread uses little or no sugar.

 

BTW - I find this to be the case on many cruise lines.

I find that most of the desserts are TOO sweet.

[Saint Greg]

7 hours ago, simplelife said:

This happened the first night of our last cruise, because the Hub app made it sound like you should request a table and one would be assigned within 10 minutes, so people came down early.  But the hostess did a good job of explaining that you should request a table, and they would message you when it was ready and you then had up to 10 minutes to arrive and claim it, so the crowds thinned out after that.

It happens everyday though. And before they had the hub It would just be a big line outside of the dining room.
 

I don’t know how they did it but I never saw anything like that on my NCL cruise. And it felt like the dining rooms were smaller on NCL. But no requesting a table on an app. No long lines. No people camped out in stairwells. I think I had a five person line once. And twice they had me sit on a couch in the dining room for a couple minutes.

 

Never a line at Starbucks either. I don’t know if these things are common with NCL or if I just got lucky or what.

 

 

Edited October 30, 2023 by Saint Greg

[MeMetwo]

7 hours ago, Saint Greg said:

It happens everyday though. And before they had the hub It would just be a big line outside of the dining room.
 

I don’t know how they did it but I never saw anything like that on my NCL cruise. And it felt like the dining rooms were smaller on NCL. But no requesting a table on an app. No long lines. No people camped out in stairwells. I think I had a five person line once. And twice they had me sit on a couch in the dining room for a couple minutes.

 

Never a line at Starbucks either. I don’t know if these things are common with NCL or if I just got lucky or what.

 

 

That’s very common on NCL. On the big ships there could be a short line at popular times, but no longer than a five minute wait in my experience.  The best thing for me is that you don’t have to deal with that annoying Hub. Also, everyone has Freestyle dining, so the dining rooms are set up so that the tables are spaced nicely apart. One of my main peeves on Carnival is that the anytime dining tables are two inches apart.  Just me, but I don’t like to dine with strangers so that I can’t talk with my husband privately. 

 

 

 

 

 

a five minute wait

[Saint Greg]

2 minutes ago, MeMetwo said:

That’s very common on NCL. On the big ships there could be a short line at popular times, but no longer than a five minute wait in my experience.  The best thing for me is that you don’t have to deal with that annoying Hub. Also, everyone has Freestyle dining, so the dining rooms are set up so that the tables are spaced nicely apart. One of my main peeves on Carnival is that the anytime dining tables are two inches apart.  Just me, but I don’t like to dine with strangers so that I can’t talk with my husband privately. 

 

 

 

 

 

a five minute wait

I did have a time in the azura dining room where i was about 6 inches from the next table. But for the most part yes.  Nice separation. Palace where I ate breakfast and lunch was pretty much always a window table. And yeah lunch. They had breakfast and lunch in the dining room. Not sure about port days but definitely on sea days. That was nice.

 

[seashells422]

They have "Singles" meet and greet listed but the bar tenders don't even know about it, and very rarely does anyone attend.  How hard would it be to have a worker host these and to encourage singles to attend these events?!

[momof3cruisers]

51 minutes ago, seashells422 said:

They have "Singles" meet and greet listed but the bar tenders don't even know about it, and very rarely does anyone attend.  How hard would it be to have a worker host these and to encourage singles to attend these events?!

Same with the 18-21 year old events they “hosted” for a time. My daughter looked closely for events everyday. Nothing. We ended up asking the cruise director and she said no one had come the first night so they cancelled them for the rest of the week. How dumb is that? 

[seashells422]

41 minutes ago, momof3cruisers said:

Same with the 18-21 year old events they “hosted” for a time. My daughter looked closely for events everyday. Nothing. We ended up asking the cruise director and she said no one had come the first night so they cancelled them for the rest of the week. How dumb is that? 

Yes that is dumb and very discouraging.

[Kuhmero]

Do yoy remember If they had a shoe for the blackjack games or was it all dealt with an auto shuffler.

[Drew B 58]

On 11/2/2023 at 8:51 PM, Kuhmero said:

Do yoy remember If they had a shoe for the blackjack games or was it all dealt with an auto shuffler.

On my last cruise, it was an auto shuffler for regular blackjack and a shoe for “Fun 21” (Spanish blackjack, outside of Carnival ships).