My wife and I made our reservations for this 12 day European Cruise many months ago and based our decision on previous cruise experiences with Carnival, the price, and primarily the itinerary that included such great ports as Naples, Venice, Dubrovnik, Messina, Barcelona, Cannes, and Livorno. We have been to many of those places before and thought this was a wonderful itinerary.
We came to Rome a week early and explored Italy and until our cruise started on October 10, 2006. The ship is beautiful, well maintained and nice. Food was usually quite good, some steaks were tough. Entertainment was good. John Heald the cruise director is great. We have had him on another cruise and he is very good. However, he needs to get out early when the ship is ready for folks to disembark at each port and see how terrible the service is for those leaving the ship to sight see on their own. We signed up for one tour out of Cannes for $338. for the two of us for the day and it was good. I have been to all the other locations except for Dubrovnik and Messina so we opted to do our own tours. Nobody could or would help us upon leaving the ship and none had answers as to when or where local transportation could be found. We were consistently told that buses would be available to take us to the cities. We are early risers so would be ready to disembark when the times were announced. They were usually late!!! We found that the service for us as non-tour folks was non-existent. We walked an hour to and from several ports since there were no options other than expensive taxis. We would leave the ship between 7 and 8AM and be told that our buses would start running about 9 or 9:30!!!
We had booked an interior room because it was cheaper, but my wife was having panic attacks and could not sleep worrying about not having a window to see out. So we for medical reasons we called and booked a window room for $1,000. more. Since we had traveled with Carnival before they gave us a $200. on board credit. To our shock when we checked our on screen portfolio on board we found that the $200 on board credit had been deleted. Upon checking we were told that since we upgraded we lost the credit. We talked with the pursers office many times about this issue and they were very understanding until it came time to explain that we would not get a credit!!! They checked with Carnival's head offices a number of times and the answer kept coming back no credit. They refused to let us talk with the head purser.