Accessibility on the Carnival Radiance

    We've just returned from a four-day cruise on the Carnival Radiance departing from Los Angeles, California and I learned so much about getting around in my new electric wheelchair.  If you're interested in hopping on one of these very affordable cruises and you have mobility issues, you might be wondering if it will work for you.

    Carnival has taken many steps to enhance accessibility on the Radiance including:

• Providing maps with accessibility paths on every floor at the elevator banks (see images below) 
• They have added in many automatic sliding doors
• The stateroom hallways are the widest I've seen on any cruise ship
• They have tables marked for handicap use in restaurants and seats in some lounges
• In the buffet, staff watch out for people with mobility issues and offer to help
• When going up and down ramps to enter or exit the ship there were always staff there to help
• They had a special guest services counter window with a lower, accessible height
• They had an accessible option for boarding the water shuttle, though it was pretty scary

    That said, there were many aspects of the ship that were very difficult if not impossible to navigate:

• The door in the photo above is the only "accessible" entrance to the adults only Serenity deck, but the door is a heavy, outward-opening one with no powered button to open it.  If you were alone and did not have an able-bodied companion, you would not be able to access this area of the ship.
• Many of the decks are broken up with restaurants or other service areas in the middle, so if you want to get from an area on that deck at the front of the ship to the back of the ship on the same deck you would have to either go up or down to a different floor, traverse the length of the ship, and then return to your original floor.  This was the case on decks 3 and 4 where much of the activity of the ship was located including the main dining rooms, theater, guest services, shops, and comedy lounge. The suggested route given by the staff included going through the casino on deck 5, which was also the indoor smoking area.
• Certain decks can only be accessed by certain elevators. At one point we were told to go to the elevator bank on deck 3, take the elevator one floor down to deck 2, walk aft to the mid ship elevators and take them to deck 0. At another time I was attempting to reach the serenity deck mentioned above. I had to take the elevator to a different level to be able to go from the back to the front of the ship, then take an elevator to deck 9, because that was the highest it would go, then take another elevator to 12. As it turns out, only two of the 24 (?) elevators on the ship go to deck 12 which is both the serenity deck AND all of the kids club areas. After all this I found that I couldn't even get onto the serenity deck :(.
• Many of the doors to the exterior walkways had lips which made them impassible for a wheelchair.  For example, after dinner one night we wanted to go to the comedy show in the Limelight Lounge which is right next to the restaurant.  Unfortunately the aft doors for the Lounge were closed and the queue for the show was forming at the forward doors.  The simplest route between these doors was to go outside and walk down to the midship area and go back in.  Unfortunately I was unable to exit the doors to the outside so I had to, you guessed it, take the elevator up to the casino and cross to midship and then take another elevator down.
• This may not seem so bad, until you factor in that it can take up to ten minutes, or more, to get on each elevator.  People are waiting forever and so they are not always accommodating in making room for a wheelchair. I often can't get to the elevator before the doors close. And a good deal of the time when an elevator finally arrives it is already full.  This means it can literally take upwards of half an hour to get from one place on the ship to another. I can drive to my son's apartment 11 miles away in traffic faster than that!
• The night before we arrived in Catalina, which is a water shuttle (aka Tender) port, I received a letter in my stateroom directing me to go to the guest services to be directed to the appropriate disembarkation point on the ship.  We did so and were given directions (involving multiple elevators) to get to the shuttle launch on deck 0 midship.  When we arrived there we were told that they had sent us to the wrong launch point and that protocol said that someone should have been escorting us to where we were supposed to go.  Evidently the accessible shuttle always goes out from the forward launch but guest services had been sending people to the wrong place for months.  We had to wait about half an hour for a staff member to escort us through the crew areas of the ship to reach the forward launch.
• The ramp onto the accessible water shuttle was TERRIFYING!  It was at such a steep angle that I felt like I was going to slide right out of my chair.  Thankfully I had someone in front of and behind me to help.  
• In Ensenada we went directly onto the dock from the ship, but the gangway to return to the ship was at such a steep angle that my chair tipped over backwards when I was trying to board.  Thankfully my husband was right behind me and caught the chair or I could have been seriously injured.

Here's the thing:  As much as I'd like to hope that they would make it so that people with mobility issues had access to all the things that able bodied people do, that's just not possible in many places.  The reality is that if you are patient and ask for help you can do MOST of the things on the ship. You're not going to get anywhere fast so you need to allow plenty of travel time. You also have to be assertive when trying to get on an elevator. Don't run over anyone's toes, but watch the floor indicators above the doors to see which elevator is likely to open and position yourself in front of it.

And now, as promised, here are the accessibility maps for the Carnival Radiance.  The dashed lines on the lower part show the accessibility paths on each deck.  Where there are no dashed lines there is no guaranteed accessibility, but you will often still be able to get between the dashed lines. To my knowledge these are not published anywhere on their website or app, but if you find them somewhere, let me know!