My girlfriend and I cruised on the Carnival Destiny on the 9/2/07 sailing out of San Juan. This was my 6th cruise, 2nd with Carnival, and my girlfriend's 2nd cruise overall and 1st with Carnival. We did massive amounts of research through Cruise Critic before the trip. We're late 20's/early 30's, both certified scuba divers, and most of our vacations involve water so we are fairly picky about the quality of water activities. This is a detailed report with grades for each of the aspects of the cruise.

PRE-CRUISE: A. We flew into San Juan with American Airlines the day before the cruise and stayed with relatives in the area that night. No problems with the flights.

EMBARKATION: A-. We showed up around 4:30pm for the 10pm departure. There were maybe 5 people in line in front of us and it went by really fast. We made it to our cabin within 20 minutes of dropping off our bags at the pier building. Porters weren't needed since all our bags had wheels. The bags showed up outside our cabin door by 6:30pm. There was a pretty big liquor store between the check-in counter and the security checkpoint with just about any kind of liquor you could want. We had read about it on other reviews so I wanted to check it out, even though we're not big drinkers and didn't need to buy anything. The only people getting stopped by Carnival security were the ones that had bottles in plain sight or had it in those obvious rectangular liquor carry-on boxes. The lifeboat drill took place at 9:30pm and it was a bit long because they had to repeat everything in Spanish. It ended right at 10pm and Destiny was off to St. Thomas with a huge party on Lido Deck. Read more