I couldn't believe this happened in the Main Dining Room on my Carnival Cruise!

Before my first Carnival cruise, I didn’t really know what to expect. I don’t really know too many people who have cruised with them - I think this is due to the fact that they’re primarily servicing the American market, and there are so many other options for Brits to travel with who would include flights etc. Infact, in two Carnival cruises that I took last year (one from Long Beach, California and another from Miami), I only met TWO other British people! Anyway, I absolutely LOVED experiencing another brand new cruise line (new for me, anyway), and understanding what the Carnival product was all about. From the second I stepped onboard, one thing was super clear - this cruise line is FUN!

Before I tell you about the Main Dining room experience on my cruises, please consider supporting my journey by SIGNING UP to receive my FREE e-mail newsletters. You can do this by clicking here. Also, every single video view and subscriber over on my YouTube channel massively helps my content to reach more people, and so I’d really appreciate your support over there, too. You can find me by searching for ‘Fraser at Sea’ on YouTube, or just click here to go straight there!

Anyway, let’s get back to business! The two cruises I took recently were onboard Carnival Vista-class cruise ships: Carnival Panorama and Carnival Horizon. For reference, here’s a photo that I took of Panorama before heading over to the port area in Long Beach - she’s a really nice size of ship, isn’t she?

Thinking about costs, I didn’t pay a huge amount for this cruise, and was therefore a little nervous about the onboard experience. Would it feel really budget-friendly, or would it just be a non-stop party ship? Thankfully, I’m delighted to report that neither of these things ended up being the reality - thank goodness! What I found onboard was so impressive for the price paid - I’m officially a big fan of Carnival Cruise Line, but I’d also acknowledge that they’re not for everybody.

One aspect of the onboard experience that I was particularly interested in understanding on my first Carnival cruises was Dining. From my experience, I find the American cruise market to be really well looked after from a food point of view on every ship I’ve cruised on over there, and I don’t think the American market would entertain the concept of a cruise ship with significantly sub-par food offerings onboard!

Overall, the food quality was decent on my Carnival cruises - I really can’t complain. You do need to remember that you haven’t paid ‘top dollar’ to be on the ship, but the food delivers what it needs to. Below, you’ll find some photos of my food in the Main Dining room, and then I’ll explain to you what happened during dinner service…

I’ll go into more detail on the food in due course over on YouTube - subscribe over there to be notified when my latest content goes live. I post twice weekly, so you’ll hopefully find plenty to enjoy!

So, what happened in the Dining room? Well, there I am enjoying my evening meal on the first night of the cruise, and suddenly a microphone-yielding Manager walks in and says the words ‘Crew: 5 minutes to go’. I thought nothing of it - maybe the main courses will be ready in 5 minutes? Who knows.

However, fast forward a couple of minutes, my food’s on the table, and the lights begin to change colour. We’ve now got loud music pumping through the room, and lots of the waiting staff have got changed into costume. I’d never seen anything like this on a cruise ship before, and couldn’t really believe my eyes, ha!

Over the next 10 minutes, they then played a couple of different songs, and the crew paused their meal service to dance to the music, and encourage passengers to get up and join them for a dance. Now, I may come across as a bit of an extrovert in my YouTube videos, but this just isn’t the case - this would be my nightmare… Luckily, I wasn’t approached (maybe being a solo traveller made them feel awkward, so they didn’t want to ask me?) - thank goodness! Here’s some pictures to show you what was going on…

Apparently this is common practice when you cruise with Carnival Cruise Line - I just didn’t expect it! As much as I’m REALLY not a dancer, I did very much enjoy how unique this was over dinner.

Not only did we have dancing crew members and passengers, but we also had a waitress take the microphone on multiple nights of our cruise to give us a song (yes, she was a really good singer). All very unexpected, but then so was SO MUCH of my Carnival cruise. If you’re planning to cruise with Carnival Cruise Line in the future, be sure to eat in the Main Dining room, and best put your dancing shoes on, just incase…!!

If you’d like to read more from my time onboard various Carnival cruise ships, click here for more posts! Thanks for reading!