Carnival Glory

I write about ships, most often about cruise ships. Over the last 20 years, I have done about 100 cruises and visited many more ships. In the course of these voyages, I have interviewed captains and cruise line executives, written articles and taken numerous photographs. Last year, I thought it might be a good idea to assemble what I have done and am doing into a website that would act as a resource for people who are interested in ships. This would include people who are planning to travel on a particular ship or line, people who have traveled on that ship or line and people who find ships interesting.

I have posted on the Beyondships website a section dedicated to Carnival Glory. It includes a profile page with ship statistics, menus, daily programs and other information. http://www.beyondships.com/CarnivalGlory-profile.html In addition, there is a multi-page photo tour and commentary on the ship starting at http://www.beyondships.com/CarnivalGlory-Tour-1.htm

Glory is a Conquest class cruise ship of 110,000 tons. As such, it is a member of the largest class of ships in the Carnival Cruise Lines fleet. It also includes Carnival Conquest, Carnival Liberty, Carnival Valor, and Carnival Freedom.

The Conquest class is an outgrowth of the popular Destiny class. This includes not only Carnival Destiny but also Carnival Triumph and Carnival Victory. The ships are technologically similar and if you know the layout of one class you will not get lost in the other.

One of the fascinating things about Carnival is that it strives to make each ship in its fleet different. It does this primarily by changing the decor of each ship. This does not mean that they simply paint a room blue in one ship and paint the corresponding room in the next ship yellow. Rather, interior designer Joseph Farcus starts with a new theme for each ship and develops that theme throughout the ship. Thus, one ship may be cities of the world and another fictional characters. In the case of Glory, the theme is color and how it has been used in different parts of the world. These themes can develop into a decor that is quite whimisical, almost theme park-like, or into a restrained elegeance. You can see this by comparing the photo tours of the four Carnival ships now featured on the Beyondships website: Glory, Triumph, Miracle and Victory.

The reason to applaud Carnival's efforts in this regard is that ships should have their own personalities. This is both a tradition of the sea and something which makes ones voyage more interesting. If all the ships in a cruise line's fleet were the same, it would be just like an airline where the planes are just a fungible means of transportation. To me, if ships became similarly fungible, it would make cruising much less interesting.