Mardi Gras

Mardi Gras is the lead ship of Carnival Cruise Line's Excel class and, at 181,808 gross tons, one of the largest cruise ships ever built for the line. She carries about 5,282 guests at double occupancy and up to 6,500 at maximum, served by a crew of roughly 2,000 across nineteen decks. Her name deliberately revives that of the original TSS Mardi Gras, the converted ocean liner that launched Carnival in 1972, and in a break from fleet convention she carries no "Carnival" prefix, the first Carnival ship to do so since the Fantasy class.

The ship was ordered in September 2016, when Meyer Turku of Turku, Finland announced an agreement with Carnival Corporation for two roughly 180,000-gross-ton vessels, and she was assigned yard number 1396. Her name was revealed on an episode of Wheel of Fortune in December 2018. Construction followed the traditional milestones: a steel-cutting ceremony in November 2018, the keel laid with a commemorative coin in June 2019, and float-out in January 2020, before delivery to Carnival on 18 December 2020.

Mardi Gras was originally intended to debut in the summer of 2020 with a Northern Europe season before crossing to New York, but the COVID-19 pandemic forced six successive postponements of her maiden voyage. She was laid up at Barcelona from January to May 2021, repositioned across the Atlantic, and finally entered service on 31 July 2021 with a week-long Caribbean sailing from Port Canaveral, Florida, which has remained her home port.

She is organized into six themed zones - Grand Central, the French Quarter, La Piazza, Summer Landing, the Lido and the Ultimate Playground - that distribute her dining, bars, shopping and entertainment across the ship rather than stacking them in a single promenade. Grand Central is a three-deck atrium with floor-to-ceiling windows and a stage for live music, while the French Quarter evokes New Orleans and the Ultimate Playground gathers the ship's most active attractions on the upper decks.

Mardi Gras was the first cruise ship based in North America to be powered by liquefied natural gas, a cleaner-burning fuel adopted in response to tightening emissions expectations from regulators and environmental groups. She is driven by two 18.5-megawatt azimuthing electric pods for a service speed of about 23 knots, and because Port Canaveral does not store LNG ashore she is bunkered from barges supplied through a partnership with Shell drawing on the Elba Island terminal in Georgia.

Her signature attraction is BOLT, billed as the first roller coaster at sea. Built by the German firm Maurer, it sends self-propelled two-seat cars around an elevated 800-foot track on the top deck, with riders able to control their own speed up to roughly 40 miles per hour. The Ultimate Playground pairs BOLT with the WaterWorks aqua park and the SportSquare recreation area, and elsewhere the ship carries chef Emeril Lagasse's Emeril's Bistro 1396, whose name nods to her yard number.

Mardi Gras was christened at Port Canaveral on 23 October 2021 by her godmother, Kimberly Jiménez, Miss Dominican Republic 2020. Her arrival was tied to a major investment ashore: Port Canaveral built Cruise Terminal 3, a two-story, 188,000-square-foot facility costing about 163 million US dollars, the largest project in the port's history, purpose-built to handle her scale. She also introduced a new Carnival livery, trading the fleet's traditional white hull for a predominantly blue hull with red and white accents as part of a push to market the brand as "America's Cruise Line."

As the lead ship of the Excel class, Mardi Gras set the template later followed by Carnival Celebration and Carnival Jubilee. She sails year-round Caribbean itineraries from Port Canaveral and remains in active service as the flagship of Carnival's newest and largest generation of ships.