I Thought The Reviews Were Exaggerating

As I always do before booking our trip, I read a review of the Royal Celebrity Princess Carnivale where this woman called it a “prison ship.” I thought that was hysterical. Though we'd never traveled with RCP cruise lines, my wife and I are cruise scene fanatics. We had been cruisers for over ten years.

From my experiences, there are two types of people in the cruise world: those who love to cruise, and those who love to complain when any little thing goes wrong. One time we were eating an awesome steak and lobster dinner and this one lady didn't eat her meal because the different foods were touching. So yeah, I learned to take reviews with a grain of salt.

Jump ahead four months to the start of our vacation aboard the so-called “prison ship,” the RCP Carnivale . Just imagine our surprise when we learned that review wasn't an exaggeration!

Our first experience was being trapped in an elevator with twelve other people for over an hour. Did I mention the vents stopped working? I had to call the emergency number six times before they found somebody that could get the thing working again. It was like it wasn't a priority for them! It got so hot that one asthmatic woman was as white as a ghost before they got the doors opened. They didn't even ask if we were ok!

We get to the room and it is about half the size in the brochure. In the picture it shows a king size bed with two end tables and a couch. The reality was a double single bed and a small corner end unit, a small shelf on the other side and no couch!

We had spent the extra to get an exterior room with an ocean-view window and balcony. Our ocean-facing room's porthole gave us an excellent view... of the lifeboats. The only time we could actually see the water from our “ocean-view” room was during the whalestrom, after the crew started lowering the lifeboats into the water. Yes, I said whalestrom – more on that in a bit.

Bar service would have been funny if it wasn't true. I tried to order a “Mexican Mama.” It took about five minutes to get the bartenders attention, and he told me to get a waitress to take my order. Huh? I waited another five minutes, waving at any waitress that came near until one finally came over to me to take my order. Directly in front of the bartender. She turned and said my order to the bartender who was right next to us at the bar. You should have seen my face. Other cruise lines have bartenders almost fighting each other to serve you, and most know your name by day two.

Sometime during that first night, the sewage backed up in our bathroom. After calling the listed phone numbers without any help, I finally called the security office and they sent someone to fix it. The maintenance guy unstopped it but left all the sewage on the floor saying that wasn't his job! I slipped and fell into the sewage when I tried to straddle the wall to get across the waste and into the shower. I left the “clean the room” tag on the handle of the door when we left and when we came back a few hours later it was flipped around to “do not disturb”!

I called to complain and they said they would send someone to clean it. Well, the next time we returned to our room there was a bottle of champagne and a box of chocolates. The bathroom wasn't cleaned, but we figured that the head person came in to drop off this gift and would send a maid shortly. We cracked open the bottle and each had a glass and a chocolate, saving the rest for later. That evening we returned to get ready for dinner and found that the bottle and chocolates were gone, but the bathroom still wasn't cleaned! WTF, who even does that?

When it came time to eat we were herded like cattle into a thin hallway to wait for three hours! There were no chairs or even room for the elderly to sit down. At least the food was decent, or maybe it was just because I was starving by the time we finally got any food.

By the second day of the cruise though, people were getting sick all over the place. I think it was the shrimp cocktail. I didn't have any, but my poor wife! She threw up over our balcony and onto the one below us. People on that balcony then throw up onto the one below, and so on. It was awful, I never felt so bad in my entire life. It's a wonder anyone survived long enough to be killed by the whales.

When the ship began to sink, feral packs of children began running through the hallways. Who was supervising them? No one. It was like Lord of the Flies. I even watched a kid walking around with a pig head on a stick! Why weren't their parents watching them? Some must have been dead for sure, but certainly not all of them.

Don't even get me started on the nighttime entertainment. Isn't “entertainment” supposed to be “entertaining”? The dance troupe was horrible, one of them even forgot the routine in the middle of the show and just sort of wandered off stage. It was tough to tell with the costumes and all, but I think that another one of the dancers was the bartender who made my drink.

I saw the comedian look at his watch at least three times to see how much longer he had to endure up there. Then he started talking about how terrible his comedy was and that he was lucky to be on stage anywhere. I thought he meant to be funny but it was too close to the truth to be anything but pathetic. To my amazement, people actually laughed at this. The only time I laughed at him was when he fell over a railing and into a whales mouth. Something about how he was screaming and waving his arms around willy-nilly. You probably had to be there to get how hilarious he looked. It was the highlight of the whole cruise.

In the afternoon of the third day we got underway again and that is when we ran into the killer whales. At first, it was fun to see them all, and there were hundreds! I didn't think that pods this large existed. They would swim around the ship in circles, everyone was pointing and taking selfies.

What we didn't know at the time was this was their hunting method. The smart bastards. They swam faster and faster and eventually a whirlpool formed, from which the ship couldn't power out of - probably due to poor maintenance! At that point the ship started to spin too, people were falling overboard. Chaos ensued.

My wife and everyone else onboard were lost to the whales. I don't know how I managed to survive the whalestrom. Maybe they were too busy eating everyone else while I floated away on some debris.

Two days later I was picked up by Cuban fishermen, who delivered me straight into the hands of the local police. They interrogated me for weeks, thinking I was an American spy or something. I finally was allowed to notify the Embassy in Havana but had to spend three months as a “guest” of Cuba until I was exchanged in a one-for-one political prisoner swap.

After I got home I contacted Royal Celebrity Princess customer service to ask for a refund no one cared what I had been through! "NO REFUND UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES" is what they kept repeating. Eventually, I got through to a manager and she gave me the only thing she could – a $75 off coupon and $25 in onboard credit for my next cruise...

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