Tampa Bay Irish

The Steakhouse on the Sunshine is very good, like it is on every Carnival Ship that has a steakhouse onboard. However, the hidden gem is Ji Ji Asian Restaurant for dinner. There is also an Italian Restaurant onboard. You can do an online search and look at the menus for all three restaurants. Once you are onboard you can access the Carnival App. You can use the app to check the main dining room dinner menus for your whole cruise. That will allow you to go to one of the pay restaurants when the main dining room menu looks less interesting.

I still can’t believe that someone in corporate approved something so cheap as the lanyard for a platinum/diamond gift. That kills your brand image. Take better care of your most loyal customers. Don’t insult them. It cost far less to retain a current customer than it does to create a new one. It would be far better to recycle popular past platinum/diamond gifts than to give them something as cheap as a lanyard. Giving a free, no strings attached, use any time, alcoholic beverage coupon would always be acceptable to me as well. 

Cave-tubing.com. They were a lot of fun and you will save lots of money over a Carnival excursion. Their website is a good representation of what they do.

Ji Ji’s Asian Restaurant (small up charge) for dinner is excellent as is the Carnival Steakhouse (slightly larger up charge). Both are worth it. 

On embarkation day (and maybe other days as well) Carnival serves pretty good barbecue at lunchtime at the Ocean Plaza Area. I think it is on Deck 5. 

Once per cruise we have dinner at the Carnival Steakhouse...although the old menu is better than the new menu. The up charge is worth the meal. If you decide to go to the Steakhouse pick a night when the MDR menu looks less appetizing. You can see all the MDR dinner menus via the Carnival App. 

9 Day Med cruise from Barcelona departing on May 21, 2020. Returning to Barcelona on May 30, 2020. If Radiance turns out like Sunshine she will be a fine refurbished ship. Already started on shore excursion research and planning. Already spoke with Delta about using Sky Miles to get to Barcelona. Going to Barcelona a couple of days early. Hope and Pray to catch a Barcelona FC game before we sail away...schedule won’t be released for awhile.

Grossly overpriced and overrated. This is the kind of thing that Carnival should offer for free to new “platinums” as a thank you.

To those who say “how can you complain about a free gift?” It’s insulting to give your best, repeat customers a lanyard. It screams “cheap.” I hope it’s not true and this was all a late April Fools joke. It doesn’t take an MBA from the Harvard Business School to figure this out. Carnival’s gift reward program is frequently criticized. Does anybody know if Carnival has ever surveyed their Platinum and Diamond cruisers as to what types of gifts they would appreciate and would motivate them to become even bigger fans of the Carnival brand? I like the idea of giving Platinums and Diamonds an Onboard Credit. Since Carnival is a lower tier brand I doubt they would ever go for it. People would be insulted by how small the OBC was. Another idea worth considering is allowing people to select their own reward. 

Not worth the money. The cheapskates at Carnival should offer free to platinum cruisers. 

No way it was worth the price of about $100/person. What Carnival should do is offer the tour to all new platinums. 

Schazzy, do an online search for Ji Ji Asian menu. Have your in laws take a look at the menu. Ji Ji serves family style so your group will pick 2 or 3 menu items from each menu category. Some things are more exotic than others. They’ll find something they like. This is the perfect opportunity to try something exotic sounding. It’s all very good. And the worse case scenario is your in laws don’t like it and go over the buffet and get something else. Trust me. They will love Ji Ji’s.

On embarkation day ONLY they offer pretty good barbecue (pork and chicken, maybe beef too if I remember correct) on Deck 5 (Ocean Plaza Area)  at lunchtime. Worth checking out. Very few people know about it. And it gets you away from the lunchtime madness of embarkation day on the Lido deck for awhile. You can always check out Guy’s Burgers and Blue Iguana later. I highly recommend paying the modest up charge and going to Ji Ji Asian Restaurant for dinner. You get to try a lot of neat new things and they serve you plenty of food. You won’t be hungry after dinner at Ji Ji’s. Have a good time on your cruise.

I have sailed on the Sunshine twice. Excellent ship. The adults only Serenity pool area is amongst the best in the Carnival fleet. 

Wrong check, we were on deck 11 or 12 in the front of the ship. We didn’t have any issues with motion on the ship. 

Jcollin,

My wife and I were Cloud 9 Spa guests on the Sunshine this past June and throughly enjoyed it. Go for a spa tour on embarkation day and identify yourself as a cloud 9 guest. They will give you a tour. They will offer you upsells on other spa services. You obviously don’t have to buy. But the tour will give you a good overview of what’s available. Ask questions about hours and protocol. We really liked the heated chairs. Have a good time. 

It is very expensive and not worth it in my opinion. This is precisely the kind of thing that Carnival should offer for free to their best customers...platinum and up.

This is only a step in the right direction. A full refund for deployed military personnel (who, by the way are grossly underpaid) and their associated family members is the only long term acceptable answer from Carnival. It would be smart of Carnival to clean this up immediately. In one sense Carnival is lucky that they haven’t had a case “go public” yet. Can you imagine the negative fall out that Carnival or any other cruise line would face if a deployed soldier, sailor, airman or marine went public about being denied a full refund and they found a sympathetic outlet in the National media to tell their story? Carnival would probably leap into action to correct the situation. However if they stuck by their policy there could be calls to boycott Carnival. Be smart Carnival. Treat our members of the military very well. It’s good business.

Our family are platinum and we live in Florida so we have been to just about all of Carnival’s Caribbean Ports of call. We would like to see Carnival travel to some new ports. Let me suggest Martinique and Guadeloupe for starters. And any chance you can bring back the topless Funnel deck?

Carnival has recently introduced an onboard app. We used it on our recent cruise on the Sunshine. The cost is $5. The app promises to facilitate a kind of onboard texting service to other passengers with smart phones who also have purchased and downloaded the app. Unfortunately the texting service didn’t always work. Some messages were never delivered and had to be resent. Other messages were delivered hours late. Sometimes the message service in the app worked perfectly. However it was hit and miss. What our group of friends resorted to doing was putting our own time stamp in the body of the message. That way you knew when the message was actually sent. The other thing we did was request that the person receiving the original message to acknowledge receipt of the message by sending a message back to the originator. Our system worked for us.

The other neat thing that the app did was give you access to not only today’s Funtimes but also the Funtimes for any future day of the cruise. This allowed us to peruse the upcoming menus for the main dining room. This allowed us to pick a night to go to Ji Ji’s Asian Restaurant (which was wonderful) on a night when the menu in the main dining room didn’t look as good. Get the app. It’s worth the $5. Go to Ji Ji’s for dinner on the Sunshine. Well worth it too.

I was on the May 26, 2018 sailing of the Carnival Sunshine. No sewer smell.

That is from the new, inferior steakhouse menu. The old menu was better, much better.

You dont swim at the turtle farm. It’s a collection of turtle pools sorted by size/age. They will allow you to hold a turtle for a photo.

Value.

If you want to go to Stingray City I highly recommend that you book it yourself and not go on the ship sponsored tour. Captain Marvin, Native Way or Moby Dick are all good choices and will be less expensive then the ship sponsored tour. The biggest advantage will be the number of people on the tour. The ship sponsored tour will put a 100 people in the water. The private tour may have a dozen people on the boat. The local tour operators are smart. They know when a ship arrives and they know when a ship leaves the island. They won’t let you miss your boat. Have fun. Don’t panic when you feel the stingrays slither around your feet for the first time. They are like puppies. Just don’t step on them. I have been to Stingray City several times and I have never seen anyone have an issue with a stingray. While you are at it....go to Hell too. And pick up a rum cake in port too. They can last up to 6 months unopened in your pantry.