Getting on a cruise ship can be a challenging experience. Embarkation day (the day your cruise leaves) has a lot of moving parts.
If you fly in on the day of your cruise, which is not recommended, you might have to deal with fears that your flight might get canceled. You also have to pack based on what's allowed on an airplane, which might necessitate a stop to pick up full-sized toiletries, bottles of wine, water, soda, or whatever else might be allowed on board your particular cruise.
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People who stay at a hotel or can drive to the port have a little less stress, but they still have to get to the cruise terminal. If they drive, finding a parking space and negotiating the elevators or stairs with luggage can be a challenge.
Once at the terminal, passengers must either check their luggage or keep it with them. Most people keep a carry-on bag with them in order to have some essentials with them and to hold their travel documents. If you check luggage, your bags need to be tagged with the luggage tags provided by your cruise line.
Passengers then go through a metal detector, have their passports (or birth certificates in some cases) checked, and show their boarding pass at least twice. Technically, you can use a boarding pass on your phone and have the porters create luggage tags for you.
In practice, it's often faster to print those items in advance, which creates a real problem.
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Carnival passengers have a printer problem
Since many cruisers travel with kids who may not be old enough to have a smartphone, printing boarding passes is faster. Luggage tags and boarding passes can be printed as soon as your booking has been paid in full and your check-in has been completed.
"On embarkation day, a boarding pass will be emailed to your email address that is linked to your reservation profile, whether Online Check-in has been completed or not. At embarkation, you may show your printed boarding pass or the boarding pass on your mobile phone," the cruise line shared.
Royal Caribbean, Carnival's chief rival, offers passengers boarding passes in its app which can also be saved to their Apple wallets.
Many passengers on both cruise lines feel better about having printed passes. That's a problem because a lot of people no longer have printers at home and it's worse for Carnival customers as the cruise line encourages paper boarding passes without technically requiring them.
Carnival Brand Ambassador John Heald recently asked his Facebook followers if they had a printer, and the answers revealed a problem for the cruise line.
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Many passengers lack a printer
Over 7,100 people commented on Heald's post and many said that not having easy access to a printer is a problem.
"Yes, but I work from home a lot. A HUGE percentage of my clients do NOT and aren't sure how to get their documents printed elsewhere, so I end up having to print them and mail them to them, which adds a whole new set of challenges (both financial and logistic), shared travel agent Andrea Leigh Arnold Miller.
A number of the posters shared that they got rid of their printers because they have limited need to print anything aside from cruise documents, which for most people only comes up once or twice a year.
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"Yes. But I work in IT. With the cost of ink and how cheap (quality) they make home printers, we encourage people to not have them unless they are working from home," wrote Sarah Beth-Gregoire. "If you absolutely have to print something, go to Kinkos. Otherwise, you're spending way too much money on service calls for us to fix printer issues because they won't stay on the network or whatever the issue is."
Carnival does not require people to print anything, but it does not provide a boarding pass in its app like other cruise lines. You can use the emailed boarding pass, and the porters can create luggage tags. Many passengers, however, feel better having printed documents and it's widely believed that the cruise line "prefers" for passengers to have a printed pass.
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"I don't use electronic devices very well. Always use the paper. Feel better having it printed out," added Patricia Perry.
Some passengers like to have a printed version if they can't bring up the saved email on their phone.
"I like holding that paper in my hand, knowing I do not have to depend on my phone," shared Katrina Cartner Williams.
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