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To say that my wife and I were excited to sail on the Dream is a bit of an understatement. It had been over a year since our last cruise, which we sail on Carnival Glory, and we were itching to get underway. Since we enjoyed the Glory we were very excited to be on one of Carnival's newest ships!
Well the excitement was very short lived as the best word I can find to sum up our experience on the Dream is underwhelmed.
Being a new ship you would imagine everything would be brand new technology and interesting features with a great ship design. Well that is not the case on Dream. The ship outlay is just ridiculous. And that is putting it nicely. They used the exact same ship design as the Glory but just made it bigger. Now the on the Glory it worked ok because there weren't so many people, but on the Dream it just made the ship feel so much smaller than it is. The public rooms were not at all big enough and so it made the ship crowded. And we all now that is a very bad thing. We never seemed able to avoid the crowds. It honestly felt as if Carnival designed the ship to get as many people on board they could but didn't enhance any of the public rooms to deal with the extra people. We have sailed on RCI's Freedom of the Seas, it has the same passenger capacity if not more and deals with the crowds SO much better. That ship never felt crowded and had massive public rooms.
The staff was another surprise, not in a good way. They seemed very green and uninterested. For one of your newest ships you would imagine they would have their best working on it. Our Steward was very nice and we enjoyed our waiters but the event staff was very distant and acted like they didn't really want to be there.
The buffet is something of a nightmare being that it is poorly run. They have a Mongolian and pasta section that sounds good but then you get there and they cook it when you order it. Which is good in theory but it means you will be waiting a good 20 minutes for your pasta or Mongolian dish since you have to wait for everyone to get theirs cooked in front of you.
What saved the trip for us was the Ports of call. All of them were simply incredible! We did however not get to port in Mohogany Bay because of high swells which was VERY disappointing. One because the swells didn't seem to bad. And two, because that meant another sea day on a ship we didn't like.
This is another area where the staff failed to us. They did not add any other activities on the ship except for things in the shops to give you sails pitches. And there were already to many of those to begin with. Every activity had a sails pitch intertwined with it so it seemed.
Overall we had a great time in Ports but not so much on the ship. So the ports are what you want but this Dream is one to avoid.
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