This was my seventh cruise and my fifth cruise line. The ship was very pretty and very clean, from there on it was all downhill. The reason we took this ship is because some close friends went on it in Feb 2005 and it was fantastic. They went on it again with us and about fifteen people from the church, bad mistake!! Our friends were in tears over the cruise because they recommended it.
We were told that a new CEO was in charge and the service could not have been worse. The fastest you could eat a meal in the dining room was two hours, then the food was not good. I actually lost weight on the cruise, that is a first for me. Several times we did not get what we ordered, we sent it back once and twenty minutes later they came back with the same plate. You could not ask what a dish was because the waiter didn't understand you. The food was very European and not to the taste of the majority of the passengers. The menu had only a few choices. For the first few nights, if you ordered iced tea with your meal, they brought a can of it and charged you $2.25. The vast majority of the crew could not speak English, I might expect that if I was sailing from the Med., but I was sailing from Florida.
We booked three in our cabin and when we arrived, the room was made up for two; two towel sets, two glasses, etc. Two times we ran out of toilet paper in our room, and twice the room steward took our ice bucket and never brought it back. The inside staterooms were small; 144 square feet compared to Carnival's 180 square feet.