While cruise passengers have their own space in their cabins, taking a cruise means embracing certain aspects of communal living.
For example, unless you always return to your room every time nature calls, you will be sharing public bathrooms with other people. That should force people to be more courteous and to clean up after themselves, but that's not always the experience (at least in the men's room).
Related: Carnival Cruise Line shares a very strict beverage policy
Cruise ships have lots of shared facilities, and passengers don't always do well with sharing. Most famously, people like to hoard chairs on the pool deck, with some people getting up early to place items on a chair that they may (or may not) return to later in the day.
That's an obnoxious practice, but the various cruise lines have struggled with enforcement because people get mad when their personal items are removed from "their" chairs.
Not everyone is courteous, and some people seem to get worse when they're on vacation. They don't always consider how their actions impact other people, and some people may just not care.
That happens on Carnival Cruise Line ships where one shared facility has the potential for abuse. Carnival Brand Ambassador addressed the problem and dismissed one potential solution in response to a recent post on his Facebook page.
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Image source: Carnival Cruise Line.
Carnival has a self-serve laundry problem
One Carnival passenger shared a problem with Heald that's likely familiar to anyone who has ever lived in a college dorm or an apartment building with shared laundry facilities.
" I just wanted to ask why Carnival doesn’t have a worker stationed in the self-service laundry rooms. They should be telling people that do laundry on a cruise ship to set a timer or something so their clean laundry doesn't sit in the washing machine or dryer for hours on end! It is not fair! It is not right! While doing laundry on Valor, there were people that put their laundry in the machines and didn't return for HOURS. This was the last sea day, and I got so mad that I literally took the stuff out of the machines and put it on the floor," they shared.
Heald answered with some humor but also made the cruise line's position very clear.
"Thank you so much for writing to me and I am so sorry to see you so upset. Can I start by saying that I know very little about the rules that apply in a self-service launderette? I do know that there is a special kind of bond between people who have bought many pairs of underpants on their cruise because they can’t be bothered to do any laundry," he wrote. "Obviously, we cannot have a staff member sitting in the laundry watching what happens."
Heald then asked his followers for proposed solutions.
"However, I do want to ask you if you have any thoughts on laundry rules and what should and shouldn’t happen there," he added.
Carnival passengers share self-serve laundry solutions
Susan Henderson Brock proposed a simple solution.
"Having experienced this in the past, a sign could be posted in the laundromat stating that unattended laundry that has completed the cycle will be removed from the machine by the waiting customer. Provide a basket for that laundry so the person next in line can remove it from the machine," she shared.
Many passengers admitted to using a version of this tactic.
"I time them. I walk around and come back in 30 mins. If clothes are still in the washer or dryer, I simply remove them. I’m not waiting on inconsiderate people. My time is just as valuable as their time. I do the same when camping. If I can set a timer and come back before the machine stops, so can everyone else," posted Teresa Campbell Allen.
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Sandy Tyrone Esterman requested a small change that the cruise line could easily meet.
"My only suggestion is to put a chair in the laundry room. That would be nice because I wore a hole in the carpet walking back and forth from my room because I had no idea how long the washer would take, so either a chair in there or a sign that says how long they take to run. And I only did laundry when I was on a back-to-back cruise because I don’t have enough clothes to do two weeks," she wrote.
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