Carnival Sunrise

Carnival Sunrise is a 1999 ship with a 2019 interior. She was built at Fincantieri’s Monfalcone yard for about $420 million and sailed for twenty years as Carnival Triumph. In the spring of 2019 she went into a yard at Cadiz, came out two months later with a new name, and has been running short Bahamas cruises out of Miami ever since.

What the Sunshine class actually is

The name is recent and slightly misleading. There is no Sunshine class in the sense of ships built to a common order; there is a Destiny class from the late 1990s, three of whose hulls Carnival has since gutted and renamed. Carnival Destiny became Carnival Sunshine in 2013, Carnival Triumph became Carnival Sunrise in 2019, and Carnival Victory became Carnival Radiance in 2021. The class is a rebuild program with a marketing label on it.

The original hull was significant. Carnival Destiny was the first passenger ship ever built past 100,000 gross tons and the largest in the world when she appeared in 1996. Triumph followed three years later, slightly longer at 893 feet on the same 116-foot beam. That is the steel you are walking around: a late-1990s Carnival ship, wide, boxy, with a big single-funnel profile and a three-deck atrium in the middle rather than an ocean view.

The rebuild

The 2019 work at Cadiz cost $200 million and ran from late February to the end of April. It added twelve new bar and dining venues, a rebuilt water park, a SportSquare on the top deck, a refitted theater, and more than a hundred cabins; capacity went from about 2,758 to 2,984 at double occupancy, in 1,492 staterooms.

What that buys you today is a Carnival food and drink lineup that is current rather than vintage: Guy’s Burger Joint, Guy’s Pig & Anchor Bar-B-Que Smokehouse | Brewhouse, Cucina del Capitano, Bonsai Sushi, Pizzeria del Capitano, the Seafood Shack, Fahrenheit 555 for steak, and the Alchemy Bar, RedFrog Pub and Piano Bar 88 for drinks. None of it existed on this ship in 2015.

What it does not buy you is a new ship. The public rooms sit where the 1999 designers put them, the corridors are 1999 corridors, and the atrium is an interior shaft rather than the wall of glass a new Carnival hull would give you.

The fire

On February 10, 2013, a fire in the aft engine room knocked out the ship’s power in the Gulf of Mexico. Toilets stopped working and sewage backed up into passenger areas, and the voyage entered the language as the poop cruise. Investigators traced the fire to a leaking fuel oil return line on diesel generator number six.

It is worth stating plainly because it is the single most-searched fact about this hull, and because the answer is dull: the machinery involved was overhauled or replaced, the ship has run for more than a decade since without a repeat, and the name on the bow was changed in part so that people would stop bringing it up. It has no bearing on what a sailing is like now.

Where she actually sails

PortMiami, year-round, on the short-cruise rotation. The great majority of her program is four- and five-night Bahamas runs (Nassau, Princess Cays, RelaxAway at Half Moon Cay, and Carnival’s Celebration Key on Grand Bahama) with a small number of five- and six-night Caribbean sailings reaching Grand Turk, Grand Cayman and Ocho Rios. She is scheduled to keep doing this from Miami through spring 2028.

Who she suits

People buying a long weekend at sea, and buying it on price. On a four-night Bahamas run out of Miami she does the job as well as any ship in the fleet: the food venues are the current ones, the water park is new, and the fare is usually the lowest number on the page.

She does not suit anyone who wants a modern ship. There is no roller coaster, no suspended bike ride, no side-facing atrium and no LNG plant humming away below; those are on the Excel ships and you can book one from the same city. She is also a poor choice for a long voyage (the shape of a 1999 hull with 2,984 people on it gets old faster than the interior does), and for anyone who minds crowds on a short, cheap, heavily booked itinerary.