July 5, 2007
Carnival to begin South American cruise itineraries in 2009
This article on Carnival cruises, is fairly interesting. I know that NCL already has a few itineraries in South America. It looks like Carnival will join them in January 2009.
I don't know if Carnival will be in South America year-round but their itineraries sound excellent from what I read in the article linked to above. NCL seems to cruise South America November through March. They have a Chilean Fjords cruise (once a month from November to March) and an Exotic Americas cruise (November = US to Santiago, April = Santiago to Boston or LA).
Carnival has gotten a lot of complaints. In this old blog entry there are 25 or 30 comments. Some are positive but some are quite negative. I was pretty harsh when Carnival decided to kick a few complainers off the boat. Talk about a bad vacation getting worse...
And Carnival is guilty of misleading advertising but so are several other cruise lines.
Some of these problems are because Carnival is a mass market cruise line. When you pay as little as possible sometimes you don't get your dream vacation. However, despite the mixed reviews, I'm going to choose NCL over Carnival.
Of course I did make up my mind years ago when I got my NCL rewards credit card, but I think if I had to decide all over again today I'd still choose NCL over Carnival. If I were given more choices, I'd have a lot to think about. For example we reviewed Royal Caribbean's Liberty of the Seas on this blog and concluded that it would be an excellent choice.
Posted by James Trotta at July 5, 2007 3:30 PM | TrackBack