Carnival Dream Review
Rating by category
Additional details
We had a group of 10 of which 6 of us drove from Virginia, 1 flew in and 3 drove up from Homestead, FL. We arrived super early at the port due to leaving Virginia due to the oncoming snow storm. We arrived at 6 am and the ship was still docking at the port. We left and grabbed a quick bite at a local McDonalds to kill a bit of time. We got back to the port at 7:15 and were able to park in the garage. We waited until 9:10 to hand over our luggage to the porters and waited for the remaining 4. They arrived and we headed into the port about 10:15. Overall process from security line to get our cards was approximately 20 minutes, we were on the ship just a little after 11.
The ship was absolutely stunning, we headed on up to the Lido while my sister dropped off a bag of gifts in their cabin. Got a row of seats in the back of the lido. Some tried the burrito bar, pasta bar and others had burgers, etc. We had a bit of a problem with some items we carried on - we were paged and ended up having one member of our party carry the items back out to our car, he got back on and off in less than 20 minutes.
We had table 535 middle of the Scarlet Dining room, our waitstaff - Igede and Hamyzah(sp?) were fantastic. Hamyzah was fairly new but did a great job. Igede was very pleasant, chatted with us even though he was extremely busy. Had a bit of problem first night with bar service. Apparently a new thing with Carnival is the bar servers don't ask any longer if we would like anything but we are to tell the head waiter (this was directly from our bar server). We had a gentleman first who seemed to debate if our table was in his section, we ended up with a young lady named Kata who was very pleasant and we met and talked to her many times throughout our cruise. She commented that her inability to ask customers if they wished to order drinks was cutting into her income as she relies soley on tips. Food was good in the dining room, wasn't anything fantastic. Chateaubriand was probably overall the best dish that we all ordered and enjoyed.