We just returned from a 7 day cruise on the Carnival Dream, it was myself, my husband, and our 15 year old son. First time on a Carnival ship, last year we did the 7 day Eastern Caribbean cruise on the Freedom of the Seas, Royal Caribbean. I wanted to cruise with them again, however they did not have anything for the dates that I was looking for, so I opted to try Carnival. I booked with a Carnival agent over the phone because I needed to book two rooms, one across from the other. This went fairly easy, and we also received a military discount on both rooms due to the fact that we are both active duty military. In regards to Carnival we were able to book two rooms, one with a balcony for about a thousand less than our one room with Royal Caribbean.

Embarkation: We arrived to the port about 1130, and getting on the ship went fairly quick. The longest line we had to stand in was the line for the security area where you go through the metal detector and have your bags screened. You cant go into your rooms until about 130pm, so we went to guest services to get extra room keys to both rooms. Then we roamed the ship, ate lunch at the Lido deck and then we went to put our bags up.

Stateroom: No big surprise here, we had one balcony room on deck 8 and an interior room almost directly across. The rooms had the standard stuff, bed, tv, bathroom. The room was about 5 foot smaller than our room on RC. I was glad we opted for two rooms, there was no space in between the bed and the couch and no privacy curtain either. Also the balcony on seemed a bit smaller, the chairs hardly fit. Our son's birthday was day of embarkation, and I had purchased the birthday decorations which were hanging in his room as soon as we opened the door, so that was great. Our room steward was great, never had an issue here. Our room was cleaned twice a day, morning and turned down in the evening. I was a little bothered by the vacuuming at 730 in the morning, and then the kids running up and down the halls at 2 or 3 in the morning. Also for some reason we heard chairs scraping the deck every night til about 2 or 3 in the morning, I think the workers were cleaning the lanai. Read more