Carnival Luminosa 2026 Ship Review + Cruise News | Carnival Cruise Line

Cruise Radio: Weekly Cruise News & Travel Tips

Terrell provides an in-depth review of his 10-night Carnival Luminosa cruise from San Francisco to Alaska, covering accommodations, dining,

Key takeaways

• Carnival Luminosa offers excellent value with strong crew service and well-designed staterooms, including the Cloud 9 Spa suite.
• Alaska cruises require layered packing due to unpredictable weather, even in summer.

Main topics

• Carnival Luminosa ship review
• Alaska cruise itinerary and destinations

Notable quotes

"You got to pack in layers. That's why you got to pack in layers."

Conclusion

Terrell highly recommends the Carnival Luminosa for Alaskan cruises, pr

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:00) This is Cruise Radio. I cruise a lot and I always sail with travel insurance. You should too. Get a free quote today at TripInsurance.com. Speaker 3 (0:09) Here Speaker 2 (0:09) we go. Broadcasting from the TripInsurance.com studios in Jacksonville, Florida, this is Cruise Radio. Speaker 4 (0:17) Hey, how's Speaker 2 (0:17) it Speaker 4 (0:17) going? My name is Doug Parker. Thank you so much for making Cruise Radio a part of your day. A review of Carnival Luminosa this week and staff writer Richard Sims back from his Bermuda cruise, and he joins us with this week's cruise news. Before we jump to Richard, though, I do want to say I've been receiving a lot of emails asking, hey, can we get this cruise line or can we get this cruise ship? If you've been on a sailing and you'd like to talk about it, drop me a line. Doug at cruiseradio.net. I record about once a month and we can schedule you and talk about your vacation and help some other people out who are looking for that ship. All right. With that said, staff writer Richard Sims. Hey, bud, welcome back. Hey, Speaker 3 (0:55) thanks for having me. Glad to be back. Speaker 4 (0:57) Are you really, though? Speaker 3 (0:58) I mean, you know what? This one's not too bad because usually I have like six months between trips, but I'm getting on a ship again in like a little over a week. So not too bad. I think I Speaker 4 (1:06) can make it. All right. Fair enough. So we start the week with the arrest of a man who called it a bomb threat. Speaker 3 (1:12) You know, they say the devil's in the details. And unfortunately, some of the key facts are missing from this particular story. What we do know is that a man from the Chicago area has been federally charged for having called in a bomb threat against a cruise ship. 20-year-old Daquan Lamont Smith allegedly made a call claiming to be on board a cruise ship in the Bahamas and saying that he had a bomb. According to the actual official documents, what he said was, and I'm quoting here, I'm coming from, I'm on a cruise boat coming from the Bahamas that left two days ago, and I'm letting you guys know now I have a bomb on the boat and I want to blow it up. That's exactly what he said. And his call, he called the cruise line to report this. And, of course, they recorded it. They gave it to the feds. The feds are now charging him. But it gets a little murky there because we don't know exactly, as we sit down to record this segment, we don't know exactly what ship it was on or what line even where this was when it took place. What we do know is that the FBI investigated and Smith has been charged with interstate transmission of a threat. And if convicted, he would face up to five years in federal prison. Speaker 4 (2:24) Our next story might be, well, it might as well be a cautionary tale about making sure you know who you're booking your cruise with. Speaker 3 (2:31) This is such a wild story. So we occasionally report on con men and women who take people's money, but rarely is there this kind of like instant karma. Now, how you view this story depends on which of the two very big personalities involved here. you believe. So Vanessa Phillips claims she booked a cruise with a guy named Antoine Wilson, someone she'd met on a previous cruise. She claimed that he charged her $1,100 for the trip, which was on MSC Seashore, I believe. It's either Seashore or Seaside, forgive me, I get them confused quite a bit. But she says he then basically cut off all communication. as the sailing date was approaching. According to the New York Post, she booked her own stateroom on the ship and then confronted him. And she did this on Facebook Live while he was in a hot tub. And she's yelling at him like, what, did you think I wouldn't get on board? Where's my money? It's so weird and dramatic and big. He then went on to make an extensive, I'm talking like an hour-long Instagram post where he explained his side of the story and he claimed to have receipts, but of course the receipts were so small it was a little hard to see. And yes, I sat through all of this because I suffer, so none of you have to. It's a very long, complicated case. It's a lot of he said, she said. Was it really a scam? That's for the courts, whether legal or public opinion, to decide. But I will say this. Friends, don't let friends get involved in messy situations like this. And while I want to say, as I always do, make sure you have travel insurance, I can't even tell you if insurance would handle this mess, how it would handle it, if it even would. I don't know. That's, again, a question for the insurance companies and the courts. But, yeah, this was some wild, messy drama that if you have a couple hours and brain cells to kill, it's kind of fun to go down the rabbit hole. Speaker 4 (4:35) Yeah, certainly a unique case there. Next, we have a sad update about an incident which took place on a cruise ship a couple of weeks ago. Speaker 3 (4:42) Yeah, unfortunately, this story does not have a happy ending. A 58-year-old man from Minnesota was on the Sun Princess with family celebrating the wedding of his son. While it's unclear exactly what happened, he seems to have fallen into the swimming pool while the ship was off the coast of Italy. He was floating face down. He was rescued. Unfortunately, He sustained catastrophic injuries, and shortly after being flown to a hospital in Rochester, passed away. The man was a pastor. Like I said, it's so sad because this was a family trip to celebrate the wedding of his son, and there is now a GoFundMe page set up for the family to help deal with the catastrophic expenses that come along with this kind of thing where he was in Italy and he had to be transported back home. There was no word on whether they had in travel insurance or not, but here's hoping because that's certainly going to be a huge expense for the family to undertake. Speaker 4 (5:42) And there was a potentially scary moment aboard a Royal Caribbean ship last week. You know, I often wonder Speaker 3 (5:49) how I'd react in this situation. Like you're watching a movie about a bank robbery and you say to yourself, what would I do if armed men burst in? Well, one scenario cruisers have no doubt. pondered is what if the ship lost power? I mean, we've all seen the movies, we've seen the documentaries about the poop cruise and the Coastal Concordia and all these kind of things. So that leads to the question, how would you react if the power went out, even for a little while? That's what happened on Adventure of the Seas last week. Shortly after leaving Perfect Day at Coco Cay, the ship lost power for about 30 minutes. Now, I live in Woodstock, New York, the middle of nowhere, where it's not at all uncommon to lose power, sometimes for days at a time. But it's different when you're on a ship. and your mind automatically can't help probably but go to the worst-case scenario. Anyway, this truly wasn't a big deal, but I'm sure it didn't feel that way necessarily to those on board. The captain made reassuring announcements, the emergency lighting came on, and the situation was resolved, as I said, in about 30 minutes. So all's well that ends well. But I have to—have you ever been on a ship that lost power for any period of time? You Speaker 4 (6:57) know, I was on a ship about a decade ago in Alaska, and it lost power temporarily. But the captain just came on and said something had to be reset, and we were good, and we had no more issues. But that was really the only time. It never went full-on dark. Speaker 3 (7:13) Yeah, I never have either. Like I said, my mind goes there. My mind is always like, oh, I wonder what I would do. Hopefully we never find out. Speaker 4 (7:21) And speaking of Royal Caribbean, a quick update on their newest ship. That would be Hero Speaker 3 (7:27) of the Seas, which is the fourth in their icon class of ships. And it reached a major milestone this week when the ship was floated out. But if you want to sail this one, you still have a bit of a wait. People think when the ship floats out, well, it's good to go. No, there's a long process after the ship floats out and it's got to go through testing and all of the innards still have to be, you know, put together all the decorating and all of that. That said, you certainly can book now. The ship will debut in Miami in August of 2027, and the sailings are open. Now, I will say this. When you book an inaugural, if you're thinking of doing it, you do kind of roll the dice. The ship could be delayed, which bumps your trip, or it could be delivered early, in which case they often do pre-inaugurals, meaning yours becomes one of the first but not necessarily the first. And believe me when I say there are people out there who get very upset if they book what is supposed to be an inaugural and suddenly there are, you know, three ships full of people getting on before them. Usually they call those like pre-inaugural or something. But it's still, you're not the first person on the ship. And that's the whole reason you book an inaugural is to be the first person on that ship. So you can book it now, but just... Keep that in mind as you're moving forward. While Speaker 4 (8:42) you were doing that story, we just got some breaking news. I say breaking news, but we can use that term loosely because we kind of speculated this a couple of weeks ago. Speaker 3 (8:49) It's true. So we've known that Margaritavillois was going to be moving a ship to Galveston. We reported that a couple of weeks ago. The real question was, you know, what ship they would end up going. And we sort of guessed that it would be the Beachcomber. And we do now have... confirmation. We just got this literally seconds ago as we were recording. The press release that we received says that they will be bringing their newest ship and signature island state of mind to Texas with the Beachcomber setting sail from Galveston beginning in October of 2027 on four to seven night escapes. So that is where the ship will be going. It will be the newest ship going out of Texas, which has become like just this. In the last two or three years, Texas has just exploded as far as the cruise industry is concerned. So we now know you can book this, but it's not until October of next year that the ship is actually arriving in Galveston. And we'll have more information on that as we move forward. But it looks like they'll be going to places like Aruba, Key West, Grand Cayman, Montego Bay. They're going to have a series of different sailings. Take a look at those and see if it's something you're interested in, and it's good to book now. And finally, Speaker 4 (10:05) if you want to win in a cruise ship casino, well, a new survey suggests exactly what ship you should gamble, or I should say ships you should gamble on. Speaker 3 (10:13) So let's start with an advisory note that the best way to come out of the casino a winner is by not entering the casino in the first place, or at least walking through to get to your destination and not being tempted by the machine's screaming wheel of fortune. That said, I did very, very well during my last sailing. So do as I say, not as I do. Anyway, a new study by the folks at Casino.com says that if you want to walk away a winner, you should gamble on, drumroll, Wonder of the Seas. Other winning ships, according to the very unscientific survey, were Norwegian Bliss and the Sky Princess. But here's the thing. This wasn't based on the number of payouts or the amount of those payouts. It was basically based on the number of people who talked about having a winning experience in the casino when they wrote about their cruise on TripAdvisor.com. But, you know, what I really want to see, okay, great, we've got this list of the winningest casinos. Let's see a list of the losingest casinos because I'm pretty sure I've played in some of those. And I think you could easily do the same thing. Instead of people who reported a positive experience on TripAdvisor, you know, go and look at people who say, oh, my God, I lost my shirt in the casino. So let's get that next, okay, casinos.com? Give us a list of the leavingest ships. Speaker 4 (11:31) And let's close out this segment with a correction that you have to make from a story last week. Speaker 3 (11:36) Yeah, so remember how earlier in the show I said the devil's in the details? Well... I got a pretty big detail wrong while we were talking about Carnival Rewards last week. I said that once you achieve diamond status in the new program, you're set for life. You don't have to keep, you know, re-earning that status. We had several people, including regular listener Roger, reach out to slap my wrist for getting that wrong. The rule is that if you made diamond before the new program started on September 1st, you stay diamond forever. But if you earn diamond during the new program, you will have to keep earning it. So I think we mentioned when we were talking about this last week, I think we mentioned that you are diamond. And so you get to hold on to that forever. Is that correct? Speaker 4 (12:24) Correct. Yeah. Speaker 3 (12:25) And at that point, it just becomes a question of do you find, you know, that the program is. worth it? Are you getting bang for your buck where the perks are concerned when you compare how much you have to spend in order to get those perks? And I will say, Reddit message boards and our inboxes and stuff, we've gotten a lot of complaints about this. And while this is... Probably a coincidence, the exact same day that they rolled out this new program, shares of Carnival Stock dropped to a 52-week low of $23.08. Interesting, Speaker 4 (13:02) because as of now, which is on Wednesday, it's at 22.92. So it's having a little bit of trouble. Oh, Speaker 3 (13:08) a new Speaker 4 (13:08) low. Speaker 3 (13:09) Yeah, interesting. Speaker 4 (13:10) All right. Well, with that said, if you have