Is Carnival’s Faster to the Fun Worth Your Money?

~ Chris Wada

We purchased Faster to the Fun on our recent cruise, but found minimal value from the program apart from a quicker boarding process.

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What is Faster to the Fun?

Carnival offers a benefit called “Faster to the Fun” that anyone can purchase. The purchase is strictly by cabin. If you purchase it for one person in the cabin, everyone staying in that room will have the same privileges.

Realistically, only those who do not hold the highest levels of status (Platinum or Diamond) need this. That’s because it’s essentially a one-time shortcut to several of the features that they receive.

When you purchase Faster to the Fun, you’ll also get a sticker on your card that highlights you have the feature. In our experience, the sticker is completely unnecessary as no one ever asked to see it.

Carnival’s Faster to the Fun benefits

On our 6-night cruise out of Miami, the price for Faster to the Fun was $149.95. Typical prices range from $80 to $190 per cruise. What did we receive for that price?

  • Priority dinner reservations at specialty restaurants and the main dining room
  • A dedicated customer service line
  • Priority service at the customer service desk onboard the ship
  • Priority embarkation and debarkation at Miami, the start and end of our journey
  • Early access to your stateroom onboard the ship
  • Priority checked baggage to your stateroom
  • For any locations where tendering is necessary, priority service to get to shore (not on return to the ship)

Whether or not you feel like the benefits of the package work for your journey ultimately depends on your own valuation. The sooner you purchase the package, the sooner it can start to work for you–in particular the priority main dining reservation time. However, most features don’t start until you show up at the cruise terminal.

If your particular cruise has many stops where you’ll be tendering, you might get more value from the program. However, know that it won’t matter much if you purchase excursions from Carnival. That’s because your tour typically meets on the ship when you need tender and you get off the ship together. So the benefits only matter if you’ve purchased an excursion on your own or you want to explore at your own pace.

Our experience with Faster to the Fun

While the cruise intended to visit Grand Cayman, due to rough waters we were not able to visit the port. That meant we missed out on the priority tendering off the ship. Of course, nothing was offered in its place for missing the stop. Just part of the risk you take by taking a cruise.

Priority selection of preferred dining time

We purchased Faster to the Fun late in the process. In general, Carnival offers it for sale well before your sailing date. Then it disappears for a while and returns shortly before sailing date as they determine if they can honor the benefits. We purchased it within a month of departure, but at that point there were no more seats available for our preferred time (early dining).

Though I purchased the cruise well in advance, we just were not able to secure early dining. And I had hoped this would allow us to secure it, but sadly it didn’t change our fate. Instead, we stuck to Your Time dining, which worked out fairly well for us.

Quicker boarding at point of embarkation

This ended up being the biggest feature of Faster to the Fun. We arrived within an hour of our scheduled time to board. The standard line was immensely long and would have taken between 30-60 minutes given how slow it was moving. Keep in mind that the line shown below is just what was indoors. The line continued outside, well before people could reach this point.

On the flip side, for those with priority boarding, there was zero line outdoors and just a short line of just a few people in front of us. We made it through security and the check-in process within a few minutes. If you don’t want to wait in line, you’ll find the feature is pretty useful.

Room ready early

So there’s a bit of an interesting “if you know, you know” aspect of Faster to the Fun. You get early access to your stateroom but they certainly don’t make it obvious. If you show up early to the staterooms, you’ll see the following sign, which states that you’re not allowed to enter.

If you have early access to your stateroom, you’re supposed to ignore that sign. No one we met inside stopped us and welcomed us onboard. I wish the benefit were more clearly identified so we didn’t feel like we were breaking the rules.

We arrived at 1 PM and found… a mess. Towels and trash were all over the floor. While we could have dropped off our carry-on bags, we didn’t want them mistaken for any leftovers from the previous passengers. Thus we ended up not being able to use this benefit. It would have been nice to relax and not worry about our bags, but not this time.

Priority baggage delivery to your stateroom

This is one feature that didn’t work as we thought it would be. Even after the scheduled departure time from Miami, our bags did not arrive. We checked with multiple crew members, but none of them offered any comfort as to where our bags were. In fact, our bags didn’t arrive until thirty minutes after departure.

I believe the best way to interpret this benefit is that there is no prioritization of bags (at least at some ports) if you leave your bags outside. Then, after they pass through security and make it onto your floor of the ship, anything tagged with the benefit will be delivered first. So there is a minor amount of prioritization from Faster to the Fun in our experience. And it certainly didn’t feel like there was much priority in the process for having that sticker.

Shorter lines to talk to customer service onboard the ship

If you need to speak to Guest Services onboard the ship, you’ll find a shorter line. If you don’t have the feature, you could stop by when the line is shorter and there will be little wait. I did need to visit Guest Services once during the trip (to request bottled water be removed from my bill per the defined benefit of their Red status–of course, it ended up being about 10 straight minutes of the employee scolding me for not doing it correctly despite no guidance given).

If you have flexibility in when you need to visit the Guest Services desk, you might find there’s little juice here. But if you don’t, there’s some value here if you need to stop by.

Priority debarkation at Miami

On the last full day, crew members gave the instruction to everyone to select their preferred time to get off the ship on the Carnival app. But I’m not exactly sure it was truly necessary. Those with the Faster to the Fun benefit could leave at the earliest possible time. Not only that, but no one ever checked to make sure we were departing at the right time.

In fact, there were people next to us who openly admitted they were just leaving on their own without making an effort to leave with their assigned group. In theory, they could enforce this by only making checked luggage appear at the scheduled time for each group. But I think in practice, because they allow anyone with the benefit to leave early, they just make all the luggage available as soon as possible. So while this sounds like a benefit, it didn’t help us much on our cruise.

Bottom line

In all, I’m not sure we got the full $150 benefit from the cruise. The main feature is just as the name suggests–getting onboard the ship sooner than others. Outside of that one benefit, we found the promised features lacking. We were happy to have checked it out on this trip, but we have no plans to try it out again. And that’s even without considering how they’re completely trashing their elite status program because too many people have this benefit they sell.

Stay tuned for the next installment where we’ll take a look at the port of Ocho Rios.

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