The Honest Truth About My Carnival Jubilee Transatlantic Repositioning Cruise

When I saw the price for a 12-day transatlantic repositioning cruise on the Carnival Jubilee, I didn't hesitate. Eight hundred dollars per day for a ship that just debuted? I was convinced I'd found the deal of a lifetime. My friends thought I was insane—mostly empty ocean, they said. "You'll be bored out of your mind," my sister warned. But honestly? That's not what happened at all. The repositioning cruise market is weird. For those who don't know, these cruises exist because ships need to move from one region to another seasonally. The Carnival Jubilee was heading from Barcelona to Fort Lauderdale for the summer Caribbean season, and Carnival was literally paying people to take up berths that would otherwise sit empty. The catch is that you're at sea for most of the voyage—five straight sea days in the middle, zero port stops. That's the part that scared everyone I talked to. I boarded in Barcelona on a cloudy Tuesday morning, still jet-lagged from my flight. The Jubilee is massive—it's one of those new Excel-class ships with 5,282 passengers at full capacity. But here's the thing about repositioning cruises: they never fill up. I later found out we had maybe 2,400 people on bo…