While the majority of cruise lines work hard to keep their facilities ultra-clean and shiny, one bad experience can be enough to go viral in the types of “cruise story horror story” videos popular in some corners of the internet and thereby can do serious damage to a ship company’s reputation.
Keeping up a 100-point ranking of cruise ship cleanliness that it updates for each ship every two years, the Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention (CDC) currently has 13 ships that fell below 90 points when it comes to cleanliness — of those, three were from cruise ship giant Carnival Carnival while the other 10 were from different (and usually smaller) lines.
Related: Carnival Cruise Line shares food rule to stop ‘nightmare’ situation
The three cruise ships, which were first reported by MarketWatch, include Carnival’s Breeze (86 points), Miracle (88 points) and Elation (89 points). The CDC identifies scores below 85 points as non-satisfactory; such a ranking could earn the cruise line fines and potentially the inability to continue operating tours.
These are the cruise lines that didn’t get the best CDC cleanliness scores
Royal Caribbean (RCL) 's Adventure of the Seas, which has its home port in Cape Canaveral and is used for tours both around the Caribbean and Europe’s Mediterranean Sea was the cruise line’s only ship to score below 90 with 89 points.
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Things are not, however, all bad news for Carnival as other of its cruise ships — Panorama and Spirit — scored perfect scores of 100.
“In the last year, all ships in the Carnival fleet received passing scores from the CDC in their vessel sanitation program,” Carnival said in a press statement on the rankings. “Out of 30 inspections conducted, our ships received 27 scores of 90 or above.”
Related: Get the best cruise tips, deals, and news on the ships from our expert cruiser
‘We continually strive for the highest sanitation standards,’ Carnival says
The cruise line also added that it “continually strive[s] for the highest sanitation standards and implement[s] immediate corrective action, often while the CDC inspectors are still on board, and use the outcomes of these inspections as learnings for our teams.”
The lowest score for ships examined in 2023 and 2024 was earned by Hapag-Lloyd Cruises’ Hanseatic Inspiration ship that is used for journeys to places like the Falkland Islands and Antarctica. In reponse, Hapag-Lloyd Cruises said that “the result of this inspection in no way reflects our high standards” and that it “immediately rectified” the conditions found on the ship by the inspector.
At the start of October, Carnival got into a different kind of spat over a cleanliness issue when a passenger angrily asked brand ambassador John Heald why the cruise line does not sell gum onboard its ships (gum is not officially banned if customers bring it themselves but the cruise line does not make it easy for them to purchase what has easy potential to become a cleaning mess.)
“I do understand that you have medical reasons to eat gum however, let me say something if I may,” Heald wrote in a Facebook post that ended up going viral. “The simple reason we don’t sell chewing gum on board is that it is a nightmare. A John Heald wearing a luminous green mankini, spread across your dining room table with an apple in my mouth kind of nightmare.”
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