My family (wife and I in late 30s, 2 kids, 6 and 8, and my parents in their late 60s) went on this cruise, departing at 11/28. Over the last 3 years, I have been on 5 different cruises: Royal Caribbean twice and Celebrity once, and was also on Carnival Valor last year, so I feel that I have a pretty good understanding of these mid-market cruise lines, and therefore able to provide a reasonably balanced and fair review.

First of all, a general comment about Pride: it's an older and smaller ship in comparison to the other ships I have been on. I didn't have huge expectation to start with, and I am glad that I didn't. If somebody is used to the newer Royal Caribbean ships and comes to this one with the same expectation, they will be sorely disappointed. But if you have more of a roll-with-the-punches, just-be-glad-I-am-not-at-work attitude, you will be fine.

DEcor: I was not a big fan of the dEcor, but not for the reason you might suspect. As many other people on this board have pointed out, it did have a lot of art pieces featuring nudes, but it didn't bother me or my family at all. We go to art museums quite often and consider these classic Renaissance paintings to be quite tame. In general, I think the decorator was going for the European opulent palace look, so there were a lot of intricate moldings and scrolls and balusters, but they were made of plastic, not real metal or wood or plaster, so as they got older, you could see scratches, misalignments and fading if you looked closely enough. In other words, they looked cheap. Also, almost the entire lobby and most of the exposed interior wall and ceiling were in various shades of metallic color. A few brushed nickel door handles or matte copper faucets may look good in your house, but when the whole 9-story atrium was in those colors, everything seemed dark and oppressive. In short, it was trying to be Louvre, but ended up more like your Italian grandparents' old house. Read more