Carnival Cruise Lines
Carnival Legend Cruise Review
Southern Caribbean

Jerry Herrmann

We sailed on the Carnival Legend from Fort Lauderdale on 11/08/2006. This was an 8 day cruise billed as “Southern Caribbean” with ports of call at St. Maarten, Barbados and Martinique and in that order.

St. Maarten never fails to disappoint anyone because of its charm, however, the St. Maarten stop coincided with their National Holiday which meant that all of the downtown shops were closed with only several remote shops at the pier available. This poor planning meant that the only port with any credible shopping possibilities was essentially closed. Carnival had to know years in advance that this port call would fall on this national holiday and with minimal effort could have rearranged the port call sequence to avoid this error but never did so. Instead they announced this fact and expressed their regrets at the initial passenger briefing.

Martinique is probably the most picturesque, but length of stay coupled with a lack of shopping opportunity and its disdain for US Dollars, made its port value questionable. Barbados is Barbados.

This was our fifth Carnival cruise and the ship was the most tastefully decorated Carnival ship we have experienced. The showers and the beds are absolutely outstanding. The tour director and his staff, however, were the weakest we have experienced on Carnival. There was more passenger face time with the ship’s master than the cruise director.

The food service was average but, nevertheless, was also the weakest of the five Carnival cruises taken. The entertainment staff managed to live up to Carnival’s standard with apparent wide approval from most of the passengers.

The shipboard TV programming choices need much improvement. Carnival emphasizes the importance of “ship’s time” to all passengers yet uses Denver, Colorado TV stations to deliver NBC, CBS and ABC content. That poor choice puts all TV content 2 hours out of sync with programming on the East Coast which is the standard for “ship’s time”. Not sure what value that choice adds as we never did meet any passengers from Colorado although I’m sure there were probably several. CNN is also included but Fox News was not, and Carnival seems deaf on responding to any recommendations to include it. Half of the programming schedules are devoted to Cruise video again, again and again and “local shows” performed by the untalented cruise director staff.

One thing consistent across all five cruises has been the very annoying game of dividing the passengers into three arbitrary “RED” , “WHITE” and “BLUE” teams all of which accumulate rather arbitrary points for successes in the various activities aboard ship. We sort of liked that on our first cruise but must say that our appreciation diminished consistently over the next four. It’s a corny idea. Carnival, give it up.