Carnival cruisers reject this major change to the boarding process

One of the biggest pain points of taking a cruise vacation for many people is disembarkation day. I’m not talking about the act of getting off the ship – most people don’t want their cruises to end, and there isn’t much that anyone can do about that.

However, in most cases you are required to be out of your stateroom at a relatively early hour. On one recent cruise (Celebrity) I took, passengers needed to vacate their rooms before 7:30. 

When it comes to Carnival cruises, you typically must leave your room by 8:30 a.m. If your disembarkation group number hasn’t been called by that time, you’ll have to wait in a common area, such as the Lido deck buffet or somewhere else.

Related: Carnival Cruise Line unveils new system to eliminate pain point

To meet the room-exiting requirements, it means you’ll have to wake up relatively early to get yourself moving and get your belongings together. This, after enjoying activities on the ship on the last night of the cruise, can be a major inconvenience.

To be fair, it makes a lot of sense why Carnival makes you leave your room so early on the last morning of the cruise. Stateroom attendants typically have quite a few rooms that need to be cleaned and ready for a new group of passengers, who are generally allowed to access their staterooms by 1:30 p.m. With all the staterooms vacant by 8:30 a.m., it leaves a five-hour turnaround window.

Virgin Voyages offers later departures

While there’s clearly a need for a window of time to get all of the rooms turned over, there’s nothing necessarily preventing Carnival from moving the entire process a few hours later.

In other words, instead of making everyone get out of their rooms by 8:30 a.m. and starting the embarkation process for the next cruise at 11 a.m., which is roughly the standard practice, maybe let guests keep their rooms until 10:30 a.m. and plan to start boarding the ship two hours later.

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Virgin Voyages is an example of a cruise line that uses a later timetable. When my wife and I sailed on Virgin’s Scarlet Lady in 2023, we didn’t board the ship until about 2 p.m. (it left at 6 p.m.). Then on the last morning of the cruise, we were encouraged to enjoy a leisurely breakfast in one of the ship’s restaurants and to take our time getting off the ship. 

At least for me, this was one of the biggest benefits of cruising on Virgin versus other lines.

Should Carnival start embarkation later?

Carnival Brand Ambassador John Heald was recently asked this very question on his widely followed Facebook page.

An unnamed Heald follower asked, “Thinking most people would want to start embarkation later if they could go directly to their room and that room to be ready. So start embarkation at 1 p.m. This would allow for a later debarkation and for us to sleep a little longer before being rudely awoken.”

Obviously, there are some practical issues with this question. Specifically, if guests can get on the ship starting at 1 p.m. and go straight to their rooms, it would still present the problem of the room attendants having enough time to get the room ready. But a later embarkation combined with a later start to the debarkation process is certainly possible.

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Heald presented this question to followers on his page, with two options. One is to agree with the original question, and the other choice was “I’m happy with the way things are done now regarding the time embarkation starts.”

It might surprise you to learn that the poll results were overwhelmingly in favor of the current embarkation process, which gives a wide range of potential boarding times passengers can use. 

As Heald follower Amy French pointed out, “If you want to board and walk straight to your room, then you board at 1:30 p.m. We’ve done this. Avoided the big lines, walk right into our room at 1:30-2 p.m. Just because you can board at 10 or 11, doesn’t mean you have to!”

Anthony Fanchi correctly pointed out what a later embarkation would likely mean. “If they do a later debarkation to allow people to ‘sleep a little longer before being rudely awoken,’ then a 1:00 embarkation doesn’t change anything. Instead of the rooms being ready at 1:30, they probably won’t be ready till around 3:30.”

It seems the vast majority of people prefer to get on the ship as early as possible on embarkation day to start enjoying their vacation – and are willing to be “rudely” awakened on the last day of the cruise to make it happen.

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