Carnival Expanding “Express Dining” Option Across Its Fleet
In the early days of cruising, dinner was an event you wouldn’t want to miss. Guests would sit down at long shared tables with fellow guests and enjoy a multi-course meal that would take 2–3 hours. Typically, guests dressed for dinner, wearing their finest for an evening out. It was almost an activity within itself on the ship.
Times have changed, though. Guests no longer want shared tables; they want to be able to wear flip-flops to the main dining room, and the thought of spending 2+ hours at a meal would make them squirm. To keep up with the times and changing customer tastes, Carnival is rolling out a new dining option for really speedy dinner service.
Express Dining Option on Carnival Ships
For the past several months, Carnival has been testing “Express Dining,” an option that lets guests get in and out of the dining room in under an hour.
Our guests continue to tell us they value greater flexibility in how they spend their time on board, and Express Dining was designed with that in mind. Our pilot program generated positive feedback from our guests. With this in mind, we are excited to expand Express Dining to offer them the same high quality dishes and attentive service our dining rooms are known for, while giving guests the ability to use more of their time to enjoy all the other onboard fun.” -Christine Duffy, president of Carnival Cruise Line.
Carnival indicated that the offerings in the “Express Dining” section will “mirror” the main dining room offerings, but will have a “slightly abbreviated selection.”
Express Dining is for “Your Time Dining” Only
Guests who want to try Express Dining must have selected “Your Time Dining” when booking their cruise. With Your Time Dining, you use the Carnival Hub app to “check in” when you’re ready to eat, and the phone puts you in the queue and lets you know when your table is ready.
Guests who have set-time, assigned dining (usually at 6 PM or 8:15 PM) will still have the same standard of service. That said, if you know you have a show at 9:30 you want to attend, just tell your waiter, and they can usually expedite your meal.
Also, Express Dining is only available to parties of 6 or fewer.
Carnival Ships With Express Dining
Express Dining is currently available on:
- Carnival Breeze
- Carnival Celebration
- Carnival Conquest
- Carnival Dream
- Carnival Firenze
- Carnival Freedom
- Carnival Glory
- Carnival Horizon
- Carnival Jubilee
- Carnival Mardi Gras
- Carnival Panorama
- Carnival Radiance
- Carnival Sunrise
- Carnival Venezia
- Carnival Vista
It will roll across the rest of Carnival’s fleet by the end of May.
My Take: Faster Dining Is Great, but Not if the Experience Suffers
Having cruised for over 20 years, I remember the days of longer dinners with course after course of delicious food and top-notch service. But now, it’s mostly an appetizer, main entree, and dessert, which shouldn’t take 2 hours. In fact, it doesn’t on many cruise lines. For this blog, I time every meal I have. In the past 3 years, only 2 meals have lasted over 1 hour and 15 minutes, and both were on Carnival.
But Carnival has to be careful in their quest to be fast. Some of the earliest fond memories of cruising were having the same waiters every night who got to know you and chatted. It made cruising feel special. Carnival has to walk a fine line between offering faster service and still delivering on the experience. On my last sailing on Carnival Celebration, I used Any Time Dining, and on 3 nights, the waiters basically just dropped off food while rushing to the next table and never came back to check on us. If that’s what Express Dining is going to be, count me out.
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