Carnival Cruise Phasing Out Beloved, But Underused Amenity

If you’re a remote worker taking cruises on the regular, your office at sea may be disappearing.

Carnival Cruise Line is gradually phasing out libraries on its ships, TheStreet reported. John Heald, the brand’s loyalty ambassador, responded to concerns about the line axing libraries on his Facebook page, explaining that new ships are no longer designed with libraries to make room for additional bars and restaurants.

“We have stopped building new ships with libraries,” Heald wrote. “The reason is so we can have other bars, restaurants etc there and the reason is also that, well, the amount of people who want to borrow a book and sit, in library silence on their Fun cruise was we saw getting less and less.”

The post, which has garnered over 3,000 comments, had a mix of passengers saying they’ll miss the libraries, not only for reading but also as a quiet place to play board games, while others said that they “never knew it was there,” and that if they want to read, there are many other places on the ship to do so.

“I think there should be some space for games and reading that is not in the middle of all the action,” one user commented. “I read constantly on a cruise, but not in the library. There are so many quiet, lovely spaces in which to indulge my habit!” another wrote.

New Carnival ships won’t be built with libraries, and as for the old ones, they’ll be renovated into additional bars, restaurants, casinos, or even an extension of more seating area to adjacent venues, Cruise Hive reported.

Related: Carnival Cruise Wants Passengers to Have Fun in the Sun — But Do This, and You’ll Get Burned With a New $500 Fee

Entrepreneur has reached out to Carnival for comment.

However, if you’re a cruise-lover who looks forward to hiding away in a ship library, Royal Caribbean offers libraries and game rooms, with some ships even featuring hidden libraries, such as the Oasis of the Seas. Celebrity Cruises, Oceania Cruises, and Regent’s Seven Seas Explorer all have libraries on ships where you can dive into a good read at sea among shelves of books.

^{The ship library on Celebrity Cruise’s Solstice. Jane Wooldridge/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service | Getty Images.}