Carnival Plagued by Another Toilet Problem

Carnival? Toilet woes? Again? Yes, another ship was beset with toilet problems last week during a seven-day Caribbean cruise, the Houston Chronicle reports. A blockage caused toilets in 410 of the Crown Princess' staterooms—about a quarter of its cabins—to stop flushing, forcing passengers in those rooms to use the public bathrooms. A rep for Carnival-owned and -operated Princess Cruises told Cruise Critic that Thursday's outage lasted from 5am to 6:30pm, though "a small number of passengers continued to experience problems over the next few days." Needless to say, this led to the now-familiar scene of long restroom lines, terrible smells, and flooded rooms, one passenger says; "I will never, ever, ever, ever cruise with Princess again, ever," another tells Click2Houston. The cruise ended in Galveston on Saturday.

To recap, since the beginning of the year Carnival has experienced really gross problems on the Triumph and the Dream, plus technical problems on two other ships. The Navy and the Coast Guard have spent millions assisting Carnival in recent years, leading one senator to ask last month if the cruise line intended to reimburse anyone. Carnival's response, issued Friday: It avoided the topic of repayment entirely, reports the AP, and asserted that its policy is to "honor maritime tradition that holds that the duty to render assistance at sea to those in need is a universal obligation of the entire maritime community." (More Carnival Cruise Lines stories.)