Carnival Magic Review

4.0 / 5.0
1,506 reviews

Carnival Magic – Lacks Magic

Review for the Eastern Caribbean Cruise on Carnival Magic
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Destinyl
6-10 Cruises • Age 50s

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Sail Date: Nov 2018
Cabin: Balcony
Traveled with children

Just returned from a 7-day cruise onboard Carnival Magic and there was no magic onboard that ship. My family and I are avid cruisers and pretty much once a year during the week of Thanksgiving we do a 7-day cruise. We normally cruise with Royal Caribbean but thought we would give Carnival a try this year. Unfortunately, we were totally disappointed with the lack of customer service onboard the ship and the poor communication and organization onboard. We had a group of about 90-100 in our party and for the most part everyone in our party had some sort of problem with their stateroom, onboard accounts, etc.

My problems with Carnival started as soon as me and my family entered our balcony stateroom. The room was extremely hot, the AC was not working. The safe in the room was locked so we couldn’t use it. I immediately went to Guest Services, which was around 4pm to let them know about the AC and the safe. I stood in a very long line to get to someone, finally I got a young lady who I explained my problems to and she said she was sending someone to our room to take care of the issues. In the meantime, my family and I went to have lunch and explore the ship while our room was supposedly being taken care of. It’s now 9pm and our AC still isn’t working and our safe is still locked. Turns out no one had even been to our room so Guest Services lied to us. Thankfully we had a balcony room because that night we had to sleep with the balcony door open since we had no AC. The next morning, I went back to Guest Services with the same complaints and once again they said they were sending someone to our room. We waited for a little while and once we realized no one was coming I tracked down our room steward and told him the problem. He tried to help, he called and got our safe open but the safe wasn’t working. We were given a new safe and that safe didn’t work. Another safe was brought to our room and guess what, that one didn’t work either. It took two days and 3 safes’ later for us to finally get a working safe. Meanwhile, we’re still dealing with no AC in our room and no one seems to have any real answers as to when the problem will be fixed. Turns out we were not the only one having an issue with the AC in the room. Several rooms on the ship had an AC problem and two days later Carnival finally acknowledged the problem by sending letters letting us know they were working on the AC. This was just an example of the poor communication and lack of customer service. They knew on day one there was an AC problem and they just lied and brushed off our complaints without being transparent about the problem. This let me know that Carnival does not value their customers. You don’t repeatedly lie to your customers when you know you have an AC problem and you’re not sending someone to our rooms fix the problem. Carnival must think their customers are stupid and they can just brush them off. Shame on them.

There were numerous issues I could write about, like the long lines at the buffet, the long lines to, etc. This commentary would turn into a novel if I wrote about all the issues with Carnival. I will finish this up by telling you about the CHAOTIC and UNORGANIZED debarkation process Carnival has. Our debarkation was so bad, you would have thought this was Carnival’s first-time cruising. I’m used to the debarkation process on Royal Caribbean which I have gone through several times and I’ve never had a problem getting off the ship or understanding what I needed to do. First, let me start by saying Carnival placed debarkation steps and times in our rooms the night before. However, when it came to debarking, they did not follow those steps, or the times mentioned at all. Some of our party got off the ship as early as 7am. Then some of us were not allowed off the ship and we were being told that the ship had not cleared yet. The staff on board made us wait, people and their luggage were camped out all over the place because they wouldn’t allow us off the ship. It’s now about 10:00 am and no one on board is communicating to us as to when we will be able to get off the ship. All they would say is you have to wait here. Meanwhile, we see a long line of people moving to get off the ship so we decided to join that line. Once we got in that line a member from Carnival’s staff told us if we were to get off before they told us to, we would not be able to get our luggage. That turned out to be another lie. We finally got off the ship and our luggage was there. Some of the other members in our group didn’t get off the ship until 10:30am or later because Carnival wouldn’t allow them to get off. It was a total nightmare. Although me and my family found our luggage right away there were so many people who couldn’t find their luggage. Our groups debarkation nightmare started at 7:00am and it wasn’t until 12:15pm that the last family in our group got through the process of getting off the ship and finding their luggage. On Royal Caribbean were usually off the ship and on our way home within hour or two at the latest. With Carnival the debarkation process took us 5 hours!!!

Cabin Review

Balcony

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