Cruises are a great way to see a lot of different places without the hassle of booking transportation, flying, or even leaving the ship. I enjoy cruises as a mode of transportation but am not a big fan of the on-board social experience so I am typically not loyal to any particular cruise line. Having said that, the casino offers from Carnival are usually pretty great so I tend to take advantage of those.
Unfortunately there are two big problems trying to book accessible cabins on Carnival:
- You have to go one-by-one into each cruise and check if accessible cabins exist at all.
- If you get a great casino offer, the accessible cabins might already be booked, even though regular staterooms are still available.
I recently got Carnival’s Elite casino offer which is fantastic. Aside from a virtually free balcony room (you pay $100pp but get $100pp in onboard credit), you get temporary Platinum status for the cruise, and free drinks everywhere on the ship. Pretty awesome, right? Until you try to book an accessible cabin.
I went thru the online process and found interior rooms at the deal price — no oceanview or balcony. I am definitely not going to cruise Alaska with an interior room, so that’s not acceptable. Thinking the Carnival casino club that sent the offer might be able to help, I sent a message and got the following response:
I have written back with my suggestions on this:
- Put an accessible-cabin filter on the website so it filters out unavailable cruises.
- Extend the offers to other cruises when accessible cabins are not available.
- Have more accessible cabins.
In addition, I called the Carnival booking line directly and here’s what happened.
I talked to a great cruise specialist who tried her best to find me an accessible cabin for the offer I wanted. She put me on hold and had to talk to someone else who had to manually go through each cruise, pretty much the same way you do online, only to find out that there were no balcony rooms available for the offer. The one Alaska cruise with an accessible balcony was not available under the offer, cost $1500+ if I wanted it, and was outside of my travel timeline.
Needless to say, I’ll also be suggesting to Carnival that they make the filter available to their in-house booking staff, as my 15-minute phone call could have been reduced to five or less.
Despite the above annoyances, I have been very happy with my experiences on Carnival thus far. The people I’ve dealt with have always been great. Unfortunately, it’s the technology or the ships themselves that seem to be the limiting factor.
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