Being virgin cruisers, I had hopes that the Carnival Triumph would be gentle with us...At times things went well and were enjoyable, but we also had some moments that didn't exactly thrill us. Before listing the Ugly, the Bad, and the Good, let me say all in all it was an overall pleasant enough experience that we will cruise again in the future. Some of the negative aspects were our own fault due to ignorance of how things work, and maybe having too high a level of expectations.

The Ugly. The long lines and wait at both embarkation and especially at debarkation. Embarkation took an hour and a half, but being excited, we didn't complain. Debarkation was a mess, over 2 hours to get through customs. My wife was in distress and they would not let her leave the line to go to the bathroom. I finally found a customs agent wondering around who could see her crying and about to have an embarrassing accident and was kind enough to take her out of line and to a restroom.

The Bad. Long lines and limited seating available on the Lido deck. We only did the buffet a couple times because it took forever to get food and by the time you got a seat your food was already cold. 3000 people was too many for us to handle. Our next cruise will definitely be on a smaller ship. Too many long lines and long waits for service. The last couple days we used room service quite a bit because we got tired of feeling crowded of overwhelmed. In both ports we didn't book any shore excursions, just wondered around and shopped and had a nice meal. Didn't appreciate all the interuptions by the street vendors who constantly invaded our privacy. Felt bad for the little kids asking for a handout, but kinda knew if I gave in to one, they would have told all their little friends and I would have been swamped bye other beggars. You would have thought the restuarant owner would have controlled some of the vendors floating in an out of his place. After the 6th different vendor tried to sell us DVD's I was getting annoyed... Read more