My wife, daughter and granddaughter boarded the Carnival Liberty in anticipation of a festive Christmas cruise. After boarding and starting to explore the ship, we began to get an uneasy feeling. The Christmas decorations were minimal at best, but we remained hopeful because this was a Christmas cruise. Suffice to say that as the days went by, it was evident that Christmas was not to be the theme of this cruise - even in Camp Carnival. There was, on Christmas day a brief Christmas service - at a time the precluded you from taking the shore excursion. And there was a lame 45 minute "Christmas" show in the afternoon.

Beside the disappointment of the lack of Christmas celebration, here were a couple of other issues. There were not shows every night like most cruise ships do, and the ones they had were short and I would say mediocre. Secondly, we had excursions planned for Belize. After sitting in the theater for 1 1/2 hours still waiting for our number to be called for the tender ride to shore we gave up and cancelled our excursion - along with a number of other passengers. Carnival's excuse was that three tender boats were not available that morning. The fact of the matter is that there were four ships in port that day which translates to at least 12,000 passengers. Even if only 50% were going ashore, that is a lot of people to tender. If you have not been to Belize, you anchor 6 miles off shore. So that is at least an hour for a tender boat to load, run to the port, unload and return. Carnival knows well ahead of time how many ships will be in port and should make the passengers aware of this fact and adjust the excurssions appropriately. There was no way that the 4-6 hour excursions could be completed in the time frame available.

This was our 4th Carnival cruise and probably our last. The previous ones were superior to this one but after taking Royal Caribbean's cruise on Freedom of the Seas it's obvious that Carnival is lacking. Read more