We just returned from a 4-night cruise to Catalina and Ensenada. We were 8 people in 4 staterooms. It was Xmas week, so the ship was very full with lots of children on board, which always makes for a somewhat more challenging experience.

Carnival is a low-cost cruise line that delivers fun cruises for comparatively little money. This is our third Carnival cruise. Carnival has always done a so-so job on food and a great job on entertainment, in ships that were nice but not as luxurious as the competition. On this cruise, there was a big drop in entertainment quality, while other things stayed about the same.

Carnival is cutting it's entertainment budgets pretty substantially, and the "shows" on this cruise were a shadow of the excellent shows I saw on previous cruises. The cast of 8 (down from 14 or 16, I believe) tries hard but the shows have been reduced to a musical revue with little in the way of production values other than costume changes. The Hasbro Game Show is OK but doesn't rise to the level of the earlier productions. Even the two comedians on our ship (who each did 30-minute shows) were not as good as previous cruises. Read more