When you use the search tool on Carnival Cruise Line’s website, you can easily filter the thousands of cruises by date, duration, departure port, the specific ship, and more.
However, it can be difficult to find cruises that go to specific ports. There is a prominently displayed “sail to” drop-down menu, but this refers to the general geographic area, not the specific ports. For example, you can find cruises that go to the Caribbean, not specifically to Nassau.
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If your goal is to book a cruise that visits Nassau, Cozumel, or one of the other ports frequently visited by Carnival ships, it’s fairly easy to find one with just a basic search. From some departure ports, it’s difficult to find a cruise that doesn’t go to Nassau.
However, if you want to visit a port that isn’t quite as common – say, Key West or St. Kitts – you can find yourself sorting through dozens, if not hundreds, of itineraries.
Carnival Freedom docked at an island.
Image source: Carnival Cruise Line
A pain point for Carnival cruisers
Carnival Brand Ambassador John Heald regularly answers cruisers’ questions on his highly popular Facebook page, and he will often post questions or requests he finds particularly intriguing as polls. After all, Heald has over 600,000 followers, so it can be a good way to gauge whether many cruisers would agree.
One follower recently made a comment about the lack of ability to search for cruises by port: “Please include an option on your website that allows you to search for cruises by the ports you wish to visit. For example, if I’m looking to cruise to St. Thomas, I should be able to search for this and then see which ships are going.”
Heald presented this as a poll question to his followers, with simple agree and disagree options. After more than 62,000 votes on the poll, cruisers overwhelmingly voted in agreement that they would use a search-by-port function.
Heald follower Diane M. Barba-Hofmann commented, “Yes, searching by destination would be a nice option.”
“Searching for a cruise by itinerary is a great idea!” agreed Duane Dukeman.
And Tami Spoerl said, “I would love to see the option with specific locations to search for a port instead of just a general area.”
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Others said the option would be nice but isn’t totally necessary. For example, Lynn Land commented, “I answered that I would probably use a function to filter by a port. But to be honest, I don’t feel it is THAT hard to search as we do now. If we want to go to St. Thomas, we search Caribbean cruises.”
However, after looking through hundreds of comments, I had a tough time finding one person who completely disagreed that the option would be nice. Some correctly pointed out that there’s a way to do it now (more on that in the next section).
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You can already search by port (sort of)
In all fairness to Carnival, you can already search for cruises by their destination ports, but the process is clunky. From Carnival’s home page, you can select “plan a cruise” from the drop-down menu at the top, select “destinations,” and click on the region where the specific port is located. You’ll see a list of all of the ports Carnival sails to in that region.
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If you select the port you wish to visit, there is a button on the next page that says “view sailings,” and you can then see a list of every Carnival cruise that visits that particular port. I followed this method to find cruises that stop in Key West and got a list of all 15 itineraries that visit the port.
So, it can be done. But the commenter makes a great point that incorporating this into the main cruise search tool would save a lot of extra steps.
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