Luminosa in Tahiti

Carnival Luminosa first entered service as Costa Luminosa in 2009. In 2022 the ship was refurbished with some of Carnival’s standard amenities and moved from Costa to Carnival, now sailing as the Carnival Luminosa. Unlike most of Carnival’s ships, the Luminosa does not have self-serve guest laundries or some of Carnivals other features available in most of Carnival’s ships. The ship can carry 2826 passengers and 1050 crew. It has 1130 passenger cabins. Luminosa is 965 feet long, 106 feet wide and has 12 passenger decks. It lacks some of Carnival’s signature eateries found on other ships and has no waterslides or splash parks. It does have a sliding dome over the main pool which would be quite useful in inclement weather if they ever actually used it, which they did not on our cruise even when it was rainy, windy, or cold. Not even when it rained hard enough that some of the crew had to constantly mop up rainwater.

carved watermelons at the buffet

The buffet had smaller stations than standard, but rumor has it on the next drydock it will be redone. For the most part the buffet was somewhat lacking compared to other ships, but it did have the salad bar separate from the hot food line during lunchtime so people just wanting salad didn’t have to wait in a long line behind people who didn’t even want it. The buffet covers a lot of ground and has different options at each station. Some do not offer much like the hamburger grill which had beef only or the Mexican one which had no chips of any kind even though it had a salsa bar. Though each station didn’t have a lot, there were a lot of stations which did make for choices in what to eat. The cakes in the buffet were some of the best we’ve ever had on a cruise ship. They were moist and flavorful and had good frosting.

Red Frog rum bar on the Lido deck

Luminosa has numerous bars, including a coffee bar called Java Blue. There isn’t a forward lounge with windows, but various bars around the ship have seating by windows that people use regardless of whether or not that particular bar is open.

Ocean Plaza

Ocean Plaza on deck 2 was a popular hangout spot for people when it wasn’t in use because it had a lot of space for people to sit and play games or work on projects. It was also one of the main duck hiding areas of the ship.

duck under a deck chair

The decor on this ship didn’t have a lot of places for hiding cruise ducks so decks 2 and 3 got a lot of them. Other public areas like hallways, stairways, and decks 9 and 10 got some too. Duck hiders and hunters were plentiful. Carnival is where cruising ducks originated and has more people participating than what we’ve seen on other lines.

duck machine in the arcade

The arcade has a claw machine full of ducks and you get to keep trying until you get one so a lot of people who didn’t bring ducks with them get ducks to hide from there.

atrium bar and tiny stage

At the center of the ship on deck 3 the Supernova Atrium has an open area that goes all the way up to the top of the ship with glass elevators running up one side. Opposite the elevators there’s a bar with a tiny raised stage behind the bar where singers perform in the evenings. There’s a statue of a large women laying on her stomach in front of the elevators with the color worn off her butt where people rub it. There’s some seating in that area and enough open space for people to easily walk through. Stairways link the lowest level of the atrium with public areas on the deck above. The steakhouse on deck 10 encircles most of the area at the top of the open central space.

atrium

There are no waterslides, but there is a small mini golf course. There are lots of 2-person pods around the upper decks that will provide some shade as long as the back of the pod is to the sun. Also lots of deck chairs. They are not all the same from one area to another with some of the pods having better cover than others and some of the deck chairs having thick cushions while others have none at all depending on their location on the ship.

mini golf course

The promenade deck does not go all the way around and the top-deck track is ridiculously small. People tend to walk all the way around the outside of the ship on deck 11 rather than using the tiny track, although anyone wanting to avoid smoke wafting up from the open smoking area near the back on deck 10 will need to turn at the track rather than going all the way around the ship.

tiny top deck track

Typical of Carnival ships there was smoking allowed in the casino, which is wide open and spreads smoke throughout a considerable amount of the rest of the ship. That was the reason we quit sailing on Carnival years ago, but the Luminosa was the only ship doing a transpacific at the time we wanted to go. Unfortunately Australia’s no indoor smoking on any ship applies only to ships sailing out of Australia rather than including those sailing into it. The buffet has handwash sinks at the entrance and the gym has alcohol wipes to clean the equipment after use, but the casino has nothing in spite of the fact that everyone in there touches stuff that multiple other people touched. Besides the cigarette smoke that is bad enough in itself, anyone smoking in there touches their cigarettes with fingers that touched things everyone else touches, then puts them in their mouth, then touches things with hands that touched their mouths. Not to mention when they blow out the smoke they blow out any germs they have along with it. So it’s not surprising that some sort of nasty virus with a bad cough quickly spread. Which adds people coughing all over things like slot machines that others then touch without any cleaning in between.

casino

The ship’s décor is somewhat tacky in some places, particularly on the stairways.

stairway decor

The thermal suite at the spa in this ship was the best that we have seen anywhere. It had a thermal pool, heated ceramic chairs in both a dry room and a sort of steamy one, a steam room, a dry sauna, and two relaxation areas. One of the relaxation areas had thickly cushioned and very comfortable loungers and floor to ceiling view windows. Both relaxation areas are supplied with pitchers of plain water as well as water with fruit in it, usually oranges. The gym is one floor above the main spa and on the same level as one of the spa relaxation areas, but each one has its own locker rooms.

steamy ceramic chairs

Free food is available in the dining room and buffet. Luminosa also has a steakhouse restaurant that costs extra and some of the stands at the buffet have things like wings or seafood you have to pay for. Carnival also has items that cost extra in the dining room as well as some of the pastries at the coffee bar. Unlike other lines that provide a variety of flavored and herbal tea bags, Carnival has only Lipton or green tea available for free. Anything else costs extra, even at afternoon tea. A lot of people bring their own tea bags. People on your time dining had to check in on Carnival’s HUB app and could not go into the dining room until the app said there was a table ready for them. Breakfast, brunch, or lunch also required reserving a table on the app even when hardly anyone was there.

one of the better stairway art pictures on the ship

Tables could not be booked more than 10 minutes in advance of when the dining room opened – and only for seating as soon as the table is available, which is a lot better than some cruiselines that allow reservations for their anytime dining that then leave those reserved tables empty for the majority of the time the restaurant is open while other people can’t get a table at all until late. The whole system worked better when it was just first come first served, let people in until it is full. We didn’t like the hassle of having to reserve the table and then wait for it to show up on the app before you could go in, but on the next cruise where we had set time dining we missed the interaction with other random passengers that you get with shared tables on anytime dining.

pork dinner from the free menu in the dining room – this one could have used less meat

Meal portions on this ship were generally a lot closer to a reasonable size than what some other lines serve. A change from the last time we were on Carnival some years ago when the portions were often humongous. Nice to see they are not wasting quite as much food now, though there are always the people who will order multiple dishes in the dining room and waste a lot of it or pile a mountain of food their plates at the buffet and throw most of it away.

spa balcony cabin

Our cabin had a pretty good amount of storage space, but only one American and one Australian outlet, with those two crowded right next to each other where only a fairly slim adapter would allow use of both. There are some USB ports on one of the nightstands. Carnival’s spa cabins are usually shown in pictures as having a blue and green color scheme, but ours was red and yellow. Probably because it was not originally a Carnival ship.

one time the daily towel animal the steward made was reading the Fun Times

The Fun Times still comes out in paper version daily with a list of activities available for that day as well as open times for shops, bars, the casino, and all of the various food venues. The information is also available in the Carnival HUB app, as are the menus which you can see for the whole cruise by picking whatever day you want to see the menu for. People can still get paper menus for the current meal in the dining room if they want one. Even if you don’t buy an internet package for other uses you can use it free for the app. The app is fairly useful onboard, but not so much when you are off ship. The app has a chat feature, which would be a lot more useful if it would alert people when a chat was sent to them regardless of whether they had the app open at the time or not instead of only alerting when the app is opened.

theater

The theater was nice. Seats in the balcony had enough of a drop from one row to the next that heads of the people in the row in front of you were low down enough not to block the view. The gym had quite a lot of equipment with treadmills being the most popular with the early morning crowd. Off and on during the first hour or so after the gym opened sometimes somebody had to wait to get one while a lot of the other things sat empty. The row of treadmills spanned the window across the front of the gym, which is one of very few places on the ship with a forward-facing view. The locker room showers are nice with a small changing area for each shower as well as the shower itself behind a solid door. The gym locker room had a free sauna so there was one available for people who do not have a pass to the thermal suite.

Looking over the Serenity deck

Crossing the Pacific on the way to Hawaii we saw a lot of garbage floating past the ship pretty much constantly, something we have not seen on prior ocean crossings. Perhaps we were passing through the current that takes things to the north pacific gyre – AKA the great garbage patch. On the 4th sea day we started seeing flying fish, something we always enjoy watching when sailing through warmer waters even if most of them do look like little white specks from the ship. Sometimes there are bigger ones or whole bunches at the same time.

Lido deck pool

Some people down the other end of the hallway at the far end of the ship from our room had a pipe running through the top of their balcony burst in the middle of the night early on in the cruise. They woke up to a flooded room with several inches of water on the floor and were told there was nowhere else for them to go so they spent a good portion of the cruise in a cabin with an overturned couch and big dryers on the floor. Later in the cruise the main Lido pool leaked into some other cabins and had to be drained and closed for several days while the pipes were fixed and most of them were not given other cabins either. The plumbing crew onboard definitely kept busy fixing pipes.

promenade deck

Overall this cruise was generally better than we expected from Carnival. The food for the most part was pretty good, we loved the thermal suite, and there’s a lot more duck hiding activity than on the lines we usually sail with. The biggest improvement they could make would be to contain their indoor smoking within a fully enclosed area that kept it from spreading about the ship. Too bad other countries aren’t smart like Australia in just banning indoor smoking.

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