Carnival Imagination: this ship was scrapped in 2020

The Carnival Imagination no longer exists. She was cut up in Turkey and no cruise can be booked aboard her, whatever the listings and photos still circulating online might suggest. Withdrawn in July 2020, she sailed from Curaçao on 27 August 2020 on her final voyage and was beached at Aliağa, Turkey, on 16 September 2020; full dismantling dragged on into 2023. Floated out on 1 July 1995 at the Kværner Masa-Yards shipyard in Helsinki and christened by Jodi Dickinson, she measured 70,367 gross tons and 261 metres, with 2,052 guests at double occupancy and around 920 crew.

Miami, then Long Beach: twenty-five years of short runs

From 1995 to 2014 she worked out of Miami on three- and four-night sailings to the Bahamas and Key West. She then moved to Long Beach, California, where she finished her career on the Mexican Baja coast, with Ensenada and Catalina Island as her regular calls. Joe Farcus gave her his most worked-out idea of the class: classical mythology lit by fibre optics, with Greek, Roman and Assyrian motifs revealed by light rather than gilding. In July 2011 Imagination brushed her sister ship Carnival Fantasy during a mooring manoeuvre, with minor damage to both sterns and nobody hurt. Her last major drydock came in 2019, at Vigor in Portland, Oregon.

Why the whole Fantasy class was retired

Kværner Masa-Yards delivered eight Fantasy-class ships between 1990 and 1998, all to the same plan. They turned Carnival into the largest cruise operator in the world, and then their age caught up with them: few balconies, heavy fuel burn, and revenue per guest that modern ships comfortably exceed. The March 2020 shutdown settled the question. Carnival Corporation removed nineteen ships from its global fleet in 2020 and 2021, six of them from this class, sold for scrap between July 2020 and November 2022. Two are still sailing.

What best takes over her role now

To find exactly what Imagination offered at the end, three or four nights out of Long Beach to Catalina and Ensenada, the ship to look at is the Carnival Radiance: a larger and completely rebuilt hull, but the same port and the same product. If it is the Fantasy-class format you are after, the two survivors are the Carnival Elation at Jacksonville and the Carnival Paradise at Tampa. All three serve different markets, so the decision starts with the port you can reach.