Janet and I prefer smaller ships these days. If you've read my review of Royal Caribbean's Star of the Seas, you know the drill — big ships were great when we cruised with the kids, but now that we're empty nesters, we've happily traded megaship madness for a more intimate experience. That said, plenty of cruisers love big ship cruising, and it's worth knowing what that experience actually delivers. Mardi Gras gave me a reason to pay attention to Carnival again.

I should get some history out of the way first. Carnival is not my favorite cruise brand, and I have my reasons. Out of more than 55 cruises, only one has been aboard a Carnival ship — a summer 1999 voyage on Carnival Imagination, when the kids were young and the bar for "good enough" was set accordingly. I inspected Carnival Pride in January 2012 when she was doing weekly sailings out of Baltimore, which counts for something but not much. Both were older vessels representing where Carnival was, not where they are now. I'm aware that's thin résumé for passing judgment on a brand, so I'll try to keep the editorializing to a minimum.

When Mardi Gras debuted — or was supposed to debut — Janet and I decided it was time to update our Carnival experience. We booked a cruise during what should have been her inaugural season in 2020. COVID had other ideas. The shipyard delays cascaded through six postponements before Mardi Gras finally entered service in July 2021, by which point our booking was long gone.

Rather than let the research go to waste, I'm writing this as a composite review — part pre-sailing research, part synthesis of what credible reviewers have reported since the ship entered service. I'm writing it as though I sailed her, which is the only honest way to put it in my voice. I haven't set foot on this ship. But I know it well enough to tell you whether it belongs in your future.

Mardi Gras was the first ship in Carnival's Excel class — a flagship designation the line has extended to Carnival Celebration (2022) and Carnival Jubilee (2023), with Carnival Festivale due in 2027. It is also the first LNG-powered cruise ship based in North America, which matters more to Carnival's environmental optics than it will to your vacation. What matters is that this ship embraces its scale with more self-awareness than most, and the result is something worth taking seriously.

By the Numbers

What Carnival Got Right

Grand Central — The Atrium, Reimagined

The single best decision Carnival made with this ship was moving the atrium to the side. On most cruise ships the central atrium is wasted real estate — a hollow column of air you look up into and quickly walk past. On Mardi Gras, Grand Central is a three-deck-high space on Decks 6, 7, and 8 with floor-to-ceiling glass panels built into the hull, giving you an unobstructed view of the sea throughout the day. At night the space transforms — LED screens, aerial performances, the New Orleans Celebration parade with its "Voodoo Moon" production number — and becomes the most animated venue on the ship. Reviewers who've sailed her consistently rank Grand Central as a highlight. It's where Bonsai Sushi and Bonsai Teppanyaki are located, along with Piano Bar 88, the Punchliner Comedy Club, and JavaBlue Café for your morning coffee. It earns its footprint.

The Zone Concept

Mardi Gras organizes the ship into six distinct zones. Carnival will tell you they invented this. They didn't — Royal Caribbean pioneered it with the Oasis class — but Carnival executed it in a way that feels genuinely their own. The zones serve a real purpose on a ship carrying 6,000-plus passengers: they distribute the crowds and give different types of travelers somewhere to self-sort. The zone design helps somewhat with spreading the crowds out, but the Promenade becomes a bottleneck at times, particularly during the parades.

Dining — The Highlights

This is where Mardi Gras earns real points. The complimentary dining options go well beyond what you'd expect from a mass-market line. Shaq's Big Chicken delivers fried chicken done properly — sandwiches, tenders, and baskets with jalapeño slaw that reviewers consistently call out as one of the better casual dining stops at sea. Guy's Pig & Anchor smokes whole briskets over hickory wood outdoors in the Summer Landing zone, and I'll confess that even reading about it made me want one. Chibang! is a Chinese-Mexican hybrid that sounds like a recipe for disaster and apparently isn't — reviewers who went in skeptical came out having eaten there twice.

On the specialty side, Emeril's Bistro 1396 is the one I keep coming back to in the research. I should disclose my history with Emeril Lagasse: my only visit to his flagship New Orleans restaurant was one of the worst dining experiences I've had in a city where that bar is set very high. Three attempts to get an entrée that was edible. They didn't charge me, which was the only gracious move of the evening. My server acknowledged something was wrong in the kitchen, which was cold comfort. I had been looking forward to a redemption arc aboard Mardi Gras. That cruise never happened, so the account remains open. Reviewer consensus on Emeril's Bistro aboard ship is considerably warmer than my NOLA experience, for what it's worth.

Family Programming

For multi-generational groups, Mardi Gras punches above its weight. Age-specific kids' clubs, the Family Haven zone with a dedicated pool area, and Serenity for the adults who need a break from all that family togetherness — the design shows genuine thought about how families actually vacation together. The Family Feud Live game show, running in a proper studio set, draws packed houses and is one of those experiences that's more fun than it has any right to be.

BOLT

An 800-foot roller coaster on the upper deck of a cruise ship, 187 feet above the ocean. Riders sit in motorcycle-style cars and can control their speed, which the promotional material presents as a feature and which I read as "you can slow down to appreciate how high up you are." Speeds reach 40 miles per hour through twists, drops, and a hairpin loop around the ship's funnel. It costs $15 for two laps.

I am not going on BOLT. I am not a roller coaster person under any circumstances, and adding "nearly 200 feet above the Atlantic on a moving ship" to the equation does not improve my position. That said, BOLT has now operated across three Excel class ships for several years without a safety incident, so my concerns appear to be mine alone. If you're the kind of person who needs to know what a roller coaster at sea feels like — and plenty of people are — Mardi Gras is the ship for you.

What Doesn't Work

The Main Dining Room

Multiple independent reviewers agree: the main dining room is the low point of the culinary experience on Mardi Gras. The food is adequate and nothing more — underseasoned, inconsistently executed, and served at a pace calibrated more for table turnover than enjoyment. That's a problem on a ship that charges this much for a cruise fare. My experience on Carnival Imagination back in 1999 actually left me with a favorable impression of the main dining room — the food was solidly above average for mass-market cruising at the time. Whatever that standard was, Mardi Gras doesn't seem to be meeting it. The specialty dining options clearly get the investment. The main dining room clearly doesn't.

Entertainment Venue Design

The open zone concept that makes Grand Central spectacular creates real problems for the entertainment. Because zones flow into one another without hard architectural boundaries, sound bleeds between venues. Reviewers describe moments where a quiet performance at one end of Grand Central is undercut by the live band firing up at Brass Magnolia two zones over. The RedFrog Theater — the ship's dedicated show venue — is too small for the passenger load, which means the entertainment team has to run multiple performances of the same show to manage demand. Get there early, or don't get in.

Crowds and Itineraries

A ship that carries 6,600 passengers is a crowd management exercise at all times. The zone concept helps, but it has limits. The Lido pools reach capacity by mid-morning on sea days, and the Promenade becomes a genuine bottleneck during the Mardi Gras parades the ship stages on every sailing. If you're not a crowd person, this is a relevant data point.

The itinerary picture is similarly uninspiring for seasoned cruisers. Mardi Gras sails year-round from Port Canaveral on Eastern and Western Caribbean routes with stops at Half Moon Cay and Amber Cove. These are fine itineraries for first-time cruisers. They're not going to bring experienced Caribbean travelers back a second time for the ports.

The Real Cost

Carnival built its reputation on affordable cruising, and Mardi Gras's base fare still reads that way on a booking screen. It doesn't stay that way. By the time you add drink packages, Wi-Fi, gratuities, the most popular specialty restaurants, and upcharges like BOLT, a week for a family of four will quietly surpass $10,000. That's not Carnival's fault — every major cruise line has moved this direction — but it's worth saying clearly: the sticker price is not the actual price.