Carnival Radiance

Carnival Radiance spent twenty years as Carnival Victory. Fincantieri launched her at Monfalcone on the last day of 1998, completed her in July 2000, and she made her maiden voyage that October as the third and last of the Destiny trio. In 2020 Carnival pulled her out of service, sent her to Spain, and spent two hundred million dollars turning her into something else. She came out in October 2021 under a new name and started work at Long Beach that December.

The Destiny ships and what happened to all three

Carnival built three of these (Carnival Destiny in 1996, Carnival Triumph in 1999, Carnival Victory in 2000), and then rebuilt every one of them. The lead ship became Carnival Sunshine in 2013. Triumph became Carnival Sunrise in 2019. Victory became Carnival Radiance in 2021. Carnival now files all three under the Sunshine class rather than the Destiny class, which is unusual bookkeeping and, in this case, honest: the rebuilds went deep enough that the original class name stopped describing what was afloat.

She is the largest-capacity of the three today at 2,984 lower berths, and because her reconstruction came last she got the most current version of Carnival’s fitout. If you want the practical distinction between her and a Conquest-class ship: she is about sixty feet shorter and around nine thousand tons lighter but carries roughly the same number of people, so she is a somewhat denser ship.

What the two hundred million bought

Navantia in Cadiz had her from March to October 2021 and stripped her out. Every stateroom was renovated and the count went up, taking lower berths from 2,774 to 2,984 and maximum capacity to 3,475.

The food is where the money shows. Fahrenheit 555, Carnival’s steakhouse, went in. So did Guy’s Pig & Anchor Bar-B-Que Smokehouse, Bonsai Sushi, Cucina del Capitano, and Big Chicken, the fried chicken counter Shaquille O’Neal built with Carnival, which had debuted on Mardi Gras a few months earlier and came here third. On the bar side she got a RedFrog Pub, Piano Bar 88, and a Heroes Bar in place of the old sports bar, making her the third ship in the fleet to carry that room. Topside, the WaterWorks park was redesigned around an AquaTunnel slide and the SportSquare ropes course was reworked.

The steel is from 1998 and the fittings are from 2021, and the second number is the one that describes the experience. She is a thoroughly current ship built on an old hull. Where that shows is in the architecture (deck heights, corridor widths, the shape of the atrium) none of which a refit moves.

Where she actually sails

Long Beach, year-round, and she is the only Carnival ship the site books out of Southern California. The great majority of her calendar is Mexico. Three-night sailings run to Ensenada, four-night sailings pair Catalina Island with Ensenada, and five- and six-night sailings reach Cabo San Lucas. The median trip is four nights.

The exception is worth planning around. Four times in 2027 (January, February, March and April) she runs a fourteen-day Carnival Journeys voyage to Hawaii, calling at Maui, Honolulu, Kauai and Hilo with long stretches of open Pacific on either side. That is six sailings’ worth of a completely different ship, sold under the same name.

Who she suits

West Coast passengers who do not want to fly to Florida, which is most of the reason she is stationed where she is. The short Baja runs are a well-drilled product and the recent fitout means the food and bars are the current Carnival lineup rather than a decade-old version of it.

The fourteen-day Hawaii voyages suit an entirely different passenger: eight days at sea out of fourteen, an older crowd, and a ship that has to entertain people for a week of open ocean. She is adequate at that rather than built for it, and anyone whose idea of a Hawaii cruise is island-hopping should look at the itinerary carefully before booking; this is a round trip from California with four Hawaiian ports in the middle.

She does not suit anyone who wants a new ship, and Ensenada is not a destination anyone travels for. On the three-night sailings the vessel is the trip, and she is a good enough vessel to carry that, but no better than that.