My wife and I were on the Carnival Liberty cruise out of Miami on April 28th. We had a few bad experiences, one totally unacceptable experience, but enough positives to make us look forward to our next Carnival cruise.

The trip started off with a flight from Baltimore to Ft. Lauderdale. On the way, I dozed off while holding a hot cup of coffee. The second degree burn on my tummy woke me up much better than drinking the cup of coffee would have. This was bad thing #1 -- obviously this wasn't Carnivals fault, but it set the stage for the next bad thing.

The transfer from the Ft. Lauderdale airport to the port of Miami went without a hitch. We arrived in the port at about 10:30 and as we pulled in we noticed the line for embarkment went out the door and down the block with nearly 1000 people waiting in it (I didn't count, but it was a whole lot of people). It took us over 3 hours to actually get on the ship. Carnival blamed it on customs, but we found out later that the liberty was late returning to port, the customs agents had moved on to check in another cruise ship, and the people on the previous cruise could not debark until the customs people could clear the boat. With a burnt belly, my tolerance at having to wait in line and in a big room with no air-conditioning, before finally getting on the boat, was really low. This was bad thing #2 (and I noted something similar happened to an earlier cruise in a previous review). Read more