ReWahoo,
I am sorry to hear about your Carnival Experience. I am with you, their responses were not quite what I would have hoped for. Carnival is not a favorite of ours. But I would have thought that they could have handled things a little better than they did.
We have had two positive past experiences with Royal Caribbean that make us want to be loyal to them. Two instances where they went over and beyond what we really expected of them
We took a "Mardi Gras" Cruise out of Galvestion several years ago on the Rhapsody of the Seas. We were supposed to sail from Galvestion up the Mississippi river and dock next to Jackson Square for three days of Mardi Gras, and then sail to Cozumel and back to Galveston on a 7 day trip. Well, the first night of the trip they announced that the Mississippi River was closed to all boat traffic due to a collision between two barges at the mouth of the river. A boat with thousands of gallons of fuel was submerged in the mouth of the river and six men where presumed dead. We would not be going to New Orleans. Instead they took us to beautiful tropical Gulfport, MS. We docked among the freighters. Things didn't look really promising for a great trip. Then RC announced that they had hired busses to bus us to New Orleans. They ran buses every 15 mins 24 hours a day for three days for anyone who wanted to experience Mardi Gras. You could basically go and come at any time. If you chose to stay on board they offered all kinds of entertainment and cheap drinks. The cruise turned out to be one of the best we have ever been on. We met and really bonded with some great people, made a couple of trips into Mardi Gras. RC really turned the situation into a positive.
Two years ago my Father-in-Law passed away very suddenly and we were actually planning to leave on a RC cruise the day after he passed away. We did not have insurance on the trip! We felt like we had just lost the money spent on the trip and were just going to write it off to lesson learned. Then our travel agent said it would not hurt to write a letter to RC and explain why we missed the cruise. My husband wrote a nice letter to them. He told them we had been on several (I think we had done about 10 RC cruises at that time,) cruises with them and the circumstances of our missing the trip. He asked if they ever sailed out of a TX with an empty cabin please consider us! He told them we would except any cabin on any cruise. They responded and said to send a copy of the death certificate and they would send us a voucher for the amount of the missed cruise to apply to a future cruise. Which we got and used on a cruise about six months later.
Back to your fog incident. We have recently heard that the Voyager of the Seas will be leaving Galveston in 2011 and that RC will not longer be sailing out of Galveston. The fog issue is one reason they are leaving that market. Seems the fog has just been a nightmare issue this year.