Carnival Fascination: scrapped in Pakistan, unlike her sisters

The Carnival Fascination has been scrapped and is no longer sold anywhere. Withdrawn from service in July 2020, she is the only one of the six Carnival Fantasy-class ships that did not end her days at Aliağa. Sold in November 2020 to the Chinese operator Century Cruises and renamed Century Harmony, she was meant to become a floating hotel; the plan collapsed, the hull changed hands again, and she was beached at the breaking yard in Gadani, Pakistan, on 18 February 2022, nine days after arriving. Delivered by Kværner Masa-Yards in Helsinki in 1994, she measured 70,367 gross tons and 261 metres, carrying 2,056 guests at double occupancy with about 920 crew.

Twenty-six years, most of them out of San Juan

Her first summer ran from New York in 1994. After that she spent the bulk of her career in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on Southern Caribbean itineraries few ships offered year-round, with Jacksonville seasons from 2011 and a return to San Juan in April 2016. Joe Farcus gave her a Hollywood and Broadway theme taken to the point of excess: a chrome atrium, life-size figures of film stars, lounges named after them, and a Bogart's café that survived to the very end. In the autumn of 2017 US federal authorities chartered her to house relief crews after Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico, work she carried out until February 2018 before a drydock and a return to regular sailings.

Why the Fantasy class no longer exists

Kværner Masa-Yards delivered eight Fantasy-class ships between 1990 and 1998, all built to the same 70,000-ton plan. They made Carnival's fortune, then the market moved past them: guests began to insist on balconies, new hulls carry three times as many people for comparable fuel, and the March 2020 shutdown made the arithmetic obvious. Carnival Corporation parted with nineteen ships across 2020 and 2021. Six of the class went to breakers between July 2020 and November 2022, only one of them in Pakistan. Two remain.

What still sails, and what cannot be replaced

The Carnival Elation and the Carnival Paradise are the last two ships of the class, so the only ones that still offer the same scale and the same feel on board: Elation from Jacksonville to the Bahamas, Paradise from Tampa to Cozumel. One thing should be said plainly. Neither of them takes over Fascination's role in San Juan, and Carnival no longer bases a ship in Puerto Rico year-round. If the Southern Caribbean matters to you more than the ship itself, start instead from the full fleet on our Carnival Cruise Line page.