This was the 3rd cruise for my wife and I and the first in about 20 years. I am a high school principal and she is a township supervisor/secretary/treasurer from Pennsylvania so we are just ordinary folks that save up for trips and hope to get our money's worth. We expect things to be very nice but also understand that no trip is going to please everyone. So hopefully that gives you a little perspective on us and will help you understand where we are coming from with this review.
Recently, I became an independent travel agent with GTI (Global Travel International) out of Maitland, FL and decided to book some family trips before to see if I made a good choice. Actually, I was very pleased with the assistance I got from GTI and of course, I made commissions by booking this trip, tax write off also, but that is another story.
We decided to book everything including airfare with Carnival. Going to Europe we did not want to take the chance of flight delays and miss the ship. So Carnival had us flying Air Canada from Pittsburgh to Toronto to Rome. This was OK but I was unable to do any of my boarding passes online and when we got to Toronto we had to do some extra paperwork because our names were messed up in the computer. There were a number of couples that had the same flight documentation and had the same problems. It was minor but still a little inconvenience. The Toronto airport is under construction that made things a little hectic but that is not Carnival's fault. The flight was very good and we enjoyed the airlines, decent food and they treated us well. We left on Tuesday, July 5 to arrive in Rome the next day for our Embarkation.