Carnival Fantasy: the ship is gone, scrapped in 2020

The Carnival Fantasy has been dismantled and cannot be booked, here or anywhere else. Withdrawn in the spring of 2020 when cruising stopped worldwide, she left Miami for the last time on 15 July 2020 and was beached at the demolition yard in Aliağa, Turkey, on 29 July 2020; cutting up the hull was finished in September 2021. She was the first of her class: floated out on 9 December 1988 at the Kværner Masa-Yards shipyard in Helsinki, delivered on 27 January 1990, and sailing her maiden voyage on 1 March 1990. About 70,367 gross tons, 261 metres, ten guest decks, 2,052 guests at double occupancy and close to 920 crew.

The ship that invented the three-night cruise

From 1990 Carnival put her on three- and four-night Bahamas runs out of Miami, something no line had yet attempted with a brand-new ship. The gamble defined the short-break product for the next thirty years. Joe Farcus built her indoor promenade to evoke a street in Pompeii, with faux-stone paving, Doric columns, terracotta urns and electric torches. Miami gave way to Port Canaveral for eleven years, then New Orleans, Mobile, Charleston, and Mobile again from 2016. In April 2019 she assisted the US Coast Guard in rescuing twenty-three people at sea. Those who sailed her remember a ship on a human scale, one you could walk end to end in an afternoon without ever getting lost.

Why the Fantasy class was wiped off the map

Eight Fantasy-class ships came out of the Helsinki yard between 1990 and 1998. They carried Carnival on their own through the 1990s, with 70,000-ton hulls, almost no balcony cabins and short itineraries. The March 2020 shutdown was the trigger. Carnival Corporation removed nineteen ships from its brands across 2020 and 2021, and the oldest went first, on fuel burn, on the balcony gap and on lower revenue per guest than modern hulls generate. Six of the eight were sold for scrap between July 2020 and November 2022. Two are still in service.

What still feels like the Fantasy

The Carnival Paradise is the closest match if you want the Gulf of Mexico, as Fantasy did late in her career: same hull, same size, four- and five-night runs to Cozumel out of Tampa. The Carnival Elation does the same job on the Atlantic side, sailing from Jacksonville to the Bahamas. These are the last two of the class, both delivered in 1998, and nobody can say how long that will hold. To weigh them against the rest of the fleet, see Carnival Cruise Line.