Carnival Radiance Aft Balcony Review · Cabin 7430

This is cabin 7430 on the Carnival Radiance, an aft balcony, and it is the first room we ran through our Great Cabin Checklist on this sailing. It scored 13 out of a possible 34 points, which puts it in our Fair category. Certainly not great, but it earns points where it counts.

The reason we built the checklist is that cabin reviews are usually somebody telling you how they felt about a room. We wanted something more objective. So we made a list of the things that genuinely make a room work, each one worth a point, and now every cabin we sail gets a number. The idea is not that a room has to tick every box. It is that you can see which boxes it ticks and decide whether those are the ones you care about.

The Power Card, and Why MSC Is Worse

Starting with the first checklist item: do you need a card in the slot to turn on the electricity and air conditioning? On the Radiance, you do, and that costs the room a point.

However, you can use any card you want, which matters a great deal. On MSC World America you have to use your actual MSC card, almost certainly because it has an RFID chip that talks to the system, and that makes everything more complicated. Being able to drop a generic card in the slot and take your room key with you is a genuinely better design. If you know whether other MSC ships work the same way, tell us in the comments, because World America is the only one we have sailed.

The Bathroom

The light switch is outside the door and there is a step up going in.

The shower has a curtain rather than a door, which costs it a checklist point. Shower gel and shampoo are included, there is a single shelf inside, a laundry line for drying swimwear, and a removable wand that is adjustable, which is useful for reaching, as Tony put it, the back of your head and all that good stuff. Not the front. Just the back.

The rest of the bathroom is fairly standard. Toilet with the flush behind the seat. What we did like is the shelf space, because there is plenty of it, plus a good amount of counter space and the towels stored within reach. There is not much storage underneath, but given the choice we would rather have the extra toilet paper that is down there.

There is an outlet for a shaver. They do not want you plugging regular things into it. You can. You should not. There are also hooks on the back of the door.

Three Closets, One of Them Baffling

There are three separate closets, which sounds generous and mostly is.

The first holds the safe, which locks with either a code or a card, plus shelves and a small hanging bar for short items, and the life jackets. The shelf in here can be raised out of the way or left as a shelf. Christina always checks the safe on arrival to make sure nobody left anything behind, and it was empty.

The second closet is where it gets strange. The hanging bar runs front to back rather than side to side, which is the first time either of us has seen that in a cruise cabin, and we have been on the Radiance before. It means your clothes hang facing away from you, so you cannot see what you have without pulling everything forward. Worse, the shelf above it does not move, unlike the one in the first closet, and Tony’s shirts looked like they would bunch at the bottom rather than hang clean. We genuinely do not understand this design. There is, at least, a full length mirror on it.

The third closet has more hanging space, a shelf, and what we are going to call a mini cooler. It is not cold enough to be a refrigerator, but it will keep things cool. One important tip: do not cover the vent on it. That is how the cooler vents itself, and blocking it is how you end up with a warm cooler and a warm cabin.

Desk, Power, and Storage

The desk area has a telephone with USB ports, two 120 volt outlets, one 220 volt outlet, and the vanity light switch. There are two glasses and two bottles of water, and those bottles are for purchase, not complimentary.

Three drawers below. The top one has the hair dryer with an adapter that has, in Tony’s assessment, seen some things. Then laundry bags for the laundry service, and a pencil and small notepad, which is genuinely handy for leaving your cabin steward a note. The other two drawers are empty and ready for unpacking.

There is a television that angles so you can watch from either the bed or the couch, a trash can, and some hangers on the wall that we suspected were magnetic and planned to test later with proper magnets.

And then the desk problem. There is no chair. No chair, no stool, nothing to sit on at the desk at all. What makes this funny is that we had literally just watched another creator’s video complaining about exactly this and Tony said he had never seen it. And there we were. Chairless. You can use the small couch, but it is not at the desk.

We also found a duck in the room on arrival, which is not supposed to happen. Somebody hid it, the cabin steward presumably spotted it and left it, and we left it for the next guests.

The Bed: Where This Room Loses Points

The bed was set up in the king configuration with the two beds pushed together, and there is a master light switch in the middle. That is the good news.

Here is the bad news, and it is the single biggest mark against this cabin. There are no outlets and no USB ports on either side of the bed. And there is only one nightstand, on the side closest to the balcony. Whoever sleeps on the other side, which in our case is Tony, has nowhere to put a glass of water.

You can drag the little table over, and then you fall over the table in the middle of the night on the way to the bathroom. As Christina put it, it is just better if each side has its own nightstand. That is a markdown in her book, and it is a fair one.

There is room under the bed for suitcases once you have unpacked. Carnival also provides a mat to protect the sheets from the dirt on your luggage wheels, and to be clear, that mat is not a souvenir. Leave it in the room.

The couch does not fold out into a bed, but the crew can make it up to look like one, with nothing underneath the cushions, so it would work for a smaller person only.

The Balcony: Good Size, Great View, Zero Privacy

The balcony door is a swing door rather than a slider, with a child lock up high if you are traveling with little ones.

The balcony itself is a good size. Not the largest we have had, but genuinely not the smallest either, and you can stretch your legs out back here. There are two chairs and at least one of them reclines properly.

What we are not going to do is call it private. There is no privacy out here at all. You can see straight down to the neighbors one level below, and we waved at them. Above us is the back of the Lido deck, where the pool, Shaq’s Chicken, the pizza, and the bar are, so the people up there have a wonderful view of you. If you tuck into the corner and nobody peeks around, you get something approaching privacy, but that is the best we can offer.

What you do get is the wake view, and it is excellent. You can see through the glass panel and the whole sightline back over the wake is unobstructed. Depending on where the sun sits you can either work on a tan or stay in the shade. The birds had got to the glass before we did, which is simply what happens on an aft balcony.

One concern we went in with: engine noise. Tony had visited friends in an aft balcony on the Miracle years ago where the engine noise was so loud you had to raise your voice to talk out there. That cabin was lower down, and we were hoping for better here. For what it is worth, that trip was in Alaska and, as loud as it was, they spent nearly all their time out there because the views were worth it. Pros and cons of everything.

The Final Score: 13 out of 34

Where 7430 earned its points: three closets with real hanging space, a full length mirror, genuinely good bathroom shelf and counter space, a master light switch at the bed, storage under the bed, usable drawers, a mini cooler, drinking glasses, a notepad and pencil, a child lock on the balcony door, and a televison that angles for both bed and couch.

Where it lost them: a card required for power, a shower curtain instead of a door, no desk chair, no outlets or USB at the bed, only one nightstand, a couch that does not properly convert, and a second closet with a hanging bar facing the wrong way.

Thirteen out of thirty four. Fair. Not great, but it gets points where it counts, and the aft wake view is the thing you are really paying for.

Should You Book It?

Our whole philosophy is that a room does not have to tick every box on the list. It has to tick enough of the boxes you personally care about.

So: if what you want is a big open wake view, sun, and somewhere to sit outside for four days, 7430 delivers that well and we were genuinely happy in it. If you need a private balcony, a place to set your phone down beside the bed, or a chair to work at, this room will frustrate you, and you should look elsewhere on the ship.

We rarely book balconies at all, and when we do we are usually after exactly this: the aft view. On that count this room did its job.

If you want to score your own cabins, the full checklist is in our app, and you can rate rooms you remember from past cruises as well as the one you are sailing next. You can also look up cabins other people have scored to help pick the right room. And tell us in the comments: cabin type, room number, ship, and the score you would give it. We want to hear from you.