For the 1st time our family booked a family vacation. My mom was on this cruise last year & loved it so we decided to book it. I spent months prior reading reviews of this ship and was somewhat leery as to whether we made a good choice and yes we did.

It was interesting when we reached the port though. We had sodas & wine in our check bags & were prepared to tear our bags apart to verify everything but all they did was pull out our wine bottles & put them back. The thing was all the wine bottles were wrapped in bubble wrap & you couldn't even read the label. One of our bags showed a wine bottle on x ray but the guy that checked our other bags just let it go.

The ship was beautiful & extremely clean. Every day the staff was polishing something. If I'm not mistaken the Pride has an Italian Renaissance theme which I was worried about (there's lots of nude artwork around) since we had some younger children with us but it didn't leave an impression on them & it was tastefully done. But it wouldn't hurt anything to put some swim trunks on the big sculpture of David at the top of the atruim LOL. We went straight to our rooms which were already finished & dropped off our bags. We were greeted by our room steward while settling in. She & her staff were amazing. She asked us our names 1 time & all our room service staff greeted us by name every day since. Our room was definitely outdated (we had a picture tube tv) but had plenty of storage space. All our luggage fit under the bed which made the room a lot bigger. We were directly below the Lido deck & didn't hear a thing. It was a little noisy on the balcony though but nothing too noticeable. One important note: We were in room 8185. The wall to the right extends out a few feet due to the structure of the ship. Not only does this create an obstructed view to the right, it also creates a wind tunnel effect which got pretty cold on the first and last day. Read more