First off I'd like to state I've gone on 11 cruises on a Carnival ship, 7 on the Elation. That being said, it is not that I really like the Elation, but I live in New Orleans and many times a 4 or 5 day cruise is all I can fit in. 4 of my cruises on the Elation I was on the Empress deck mainly because it is the easiest deck to disembark once arriving back to New Orleans. The last two cruises, because of special deals, I was on Upper, 1 below Empress and both times I was in the forward area instead of my preferred midship. One drawback to being in the far forward area is you hear a lot of noise from the mechanics of docking, kinda like having an MRI. Now for new and old problems with this ship:

New Problems:

The only new problem we had was cigarette smoke in our stateroom. When we first went to our stateroom about 1:30PM after boarding we noticed a faint smell of cigarette smoke. Later that night the smell got much worse and we both became very uncomfortable with the vile odor of cigarettes. The next morning we were awakened by the strong odor again, so we went to breakfast to get out of the room. We stayed out of our room much of the day, but the odor never did fully leave the stateroom. We went to bed rather early, but around midnight we were awakened by not being able to breath from the very strong odor of cigarette smoke, so my wife called guest services to complain and was assured they would get to the bottom of the smoke and right after that the smoke let up. Next morning about 5:30-6 same strong smell of smoke. At first guest services were very supportive with several apology letters and taking $28 off our bill. They made visits to our stateroom, confirmed the smell, ran a machine in our room, washed down the walls, changed our sheets, but like clockwork every night at 11:30-12 and every morning 5:30-6 the strong odor came back. Read more