Serenade of the Seas: Sanitation Record & Health Report

Serenade of the Seas is one of those veteran Radiance-class ships that keeps quietly doing its job while newer, flashier megaships hog the headlines — 2003-built, freshly refurbished in 2025, and still slicing through the Pacific out of San Diego (47 sailings) with the occasional Vancouver detour thrown in. On paper, the health inspection record backs up the "reliable elder statesman" vibe: a latest CDC score of 95, with an all-time and five-year average sitting at 95.5. That's a comfortably passing score by any measure — the CDC line is 86 — though it does land a bit below the 96.7 average and well under the 98 median across the 162 ships we track, so this isn't quite top-of-class territory.

Here's the nuance worth sitting with: the ship has only been inspected twice on record, scoring a 96 in June 2025 and dropping to 95 in May 2026. That's technically a declining trend, but we're talking about a one-point wobble across two data points — not exactly a five-alarm fire, more like the inspection equivalent of losing a point on a pop quiz. We don't have outbreak data available for Serenade right now (the CDC's outbreak feed is currently unreachable), so we're not going to pretend this ship has some spotless, outbreak-free history — we simply can't see that part of the ledger today, and neither can you.

Who it's for: West Coast cruisers who want a smaller, more intimate ship (2,476 passengers is downright cozy compared to the floating cities Royal Caribbean churns out these days) with a recent refurb and a health record that clears the bar without drama. If you like your cruise ships broken in rather than brand new, Serenade's 2003 pedigree plus a 2025 refresh is a solid trade. Who should skip it: anyone chasing a top-of-the-fleet sanitation score or wanting a fully documented outbreak history before booking — with only two inspections on the books and a slight dip between them, the data set here is thin enough that we'd call this "passing and fine," not "gold standard."