Two passengers who vacationed on a Carnival Cruise Line voyage are suing the company, claiming that they woke up covered in more than 30 bed bug bites during their trip last February.
Catherine Shockley and William Maycock expected the vacation of a lifetime when they boarded the Horizon cruise ship in February 2025.
Instead, they woke up on Feb. 17 — just one day into their journey — covered in insect bites, the pair claimed in a new lawsuit filed in the US Southern District of Florida.
They claim that they “felt something itchy on their legs and arms which resembled insect bite marks,” according to the complaint.
At the time, they weren’t certain where the bites came from, so they toughed it out and slept in the cabin another night.
The next morning, they woke up with even more red markings scattered from their heads to their buttocks, according to the complaint.
“Shockley searched the stateroom and discovered live bed bugs in multiple stages of life, fecal spotting and eggs. [She] identified the cause of the red markings as bed bug bites,” the complaint alleges.
From there, the pair rushed to notify “their stateroom attendant and reported the incident to guest services,” according to the complaint.
The stateroom attendants are supposed to be trained to recognize bed bugs and are required to inspect each cabin once a week, according to the Carnival website.
“If signs of infestation are present, the room is chemically treated along with all other cabins within that section,” the policy reads.
But Shockley and Maycock claimed the cabin attendants, including the stewards and housekeepers, didn’t take action after the guests flagged the supposed infestation, according to the complaint.
The pair said that by the end of the trip, they’d sustained more than 30 individual bites.
They suffered “painful welts that required medical treatment and mediation, multiple dark splotches, loss of sleep, mental distress, loss of personal property and economic loss,” the complaint states.
Shockley and Maycock are suing the cruise line on three counts of negligence and insist that the entire ordeal could’ve been avoided if the staff had completed the required inspection and maintenance.
The Horizon ship was inspected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Vessel Sanitation Program on Feb. 23, where it scored 93 out of 100. It has also scored a 91 or higher during every inspection since 2018, the department noted.
But the CDC also states that clean places aren’t automatically spared from bed bugs.
“Bed bugs are in five-star hotels and resorts. How clean a place is does not determine whether bed bugs are present,” the department wrote.
The Post reached out to Carnival for comment.
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