Carnival Cruise Line’s Brand Ambassador, John Heald, offers assistance to thousands guests every week through his popular Facebook page. Now, however, the tables have turned and he’d like a bit of help himself.
His call for assistance comes as a poll, where guests have to choose which side of the issue they prefer.
What is the issue at hand? Or perhaps I should say the concern, subject, topic, controversy, or contention? In fact, it’s all about what terms guests use to call different things onboard their cruise.
Two specific cruise-related vocabulary terms are at stake: restaurant or dining room and tender or water shuttle.
“I am in a slightly argumentative discussion with a senior beard, and it’s all about terminology,” Heald explained. “Please help me and then if I lose, I will bow down before The Beard.”
In his poll, Heald then outlines the options for the two different terms. First up is whether the main eatery with assigned times is a dining room or a restaurant.
In July 2024, Heald and the senior beards actually had this same debate about what to call the space.
“I am always under pressure from a few beards to stop calling the dinning room a dinning room and move to the ‘official’ term of restaurant,” he explained at the time.
In recent years, Carnival Cruise Line has worked to modernize language and now prefers to call these spaces restaurants instead. But how do guests feel today?
For the beards’ choice, “The place where guests go for dinner most nights on the ship is called a restaurant,” just 2% (roughly 890) of the more than 44,500 votes cast agree.
In contrast, 49% of votes (more than 21,700) prefer “the place where guests go for dinner most nights on the ship is called the dining room.”
Personally, I also call it the “main dining room” or “dining room.” For me, the term “restaurant” refers to the extra-charge specialty restaurants onboard, such as Fahrenheit 555 or Cucina del Capitano.
The second vocabulary word up for debate is whether “tender” or “water shuttle” is the favorite for the small boats that ferry guests from the cruise ship to ports that don’t have larger docks.
Ports like Grand Cayman, Half Moon Cay, and Cabo San Lucas all rely on these small boats for guests to visit.
While not quite as definitive as dining room versus restaurant, the old school term “tender” is still favored with 45% (20,000 votes) of the total. Meanwhile, “water shuttle” garnered just 4% (1,800 votes) of the total.
As I’ve been cruising for more than 20 years, I’m firmly in the “tender” group. They’re such fun as a great way to visit a port and get great photos of the ship besides.
While some terms, such as a preference for dining room versus restaurant, may not make much difference, other terms can be a bit confusing.
I admit, the first time I heard the term “tender,” I didn’t understand what it meant. In that case, “water shuttle” may be more helpful to new cruisers, and it is certainly more descriptive.
While it’s fairly easy to learn port and starboard as well as fore and aft, some other cruise words can be equally confusing.
For example, do you call it a “muster drill” or a “safety drill”? Or how about another one Heald has debated in recent years: are they “stateroom stewards” or “cabin attendants”?
I suppose at least if we’re not debating butter or margarine, it doesn’t really matter what we call such things – we all know what we mean!
Melissa has been offering her expertise on cruises since 2017 and reporting on cruise news since 2021. her work has been featured in newspapers, blogs, and websites on a wide range of subjects, but cruises remain her favorite topic to cover. She has been on more than 40 voyages to the Caribbean, Mexico, Alaska, Hawaii, and more, and always has at least one more sailing booked on the horizon.