Boarding was fine. The balcony cabin was light colored and very adequate as a base of operations. The only exception to this was severe mold on the shower tiles and grout.Choose the "your time" dining for dinner at it suits your schedule. Food was mediocre at best. It was an identical desert menu every night and contained only basic menu items. Dinner choices were simple, plain, limited and ranged from quite good to inedible. The buffet was horrible as it always is on Carnival. The sandwich and Chinese stations was quite good if you don't want to kill 1-1/2 hrs in the sit sown restaurant or choke on the nightly buffets. Do not cruise on Carnival if you like food. Carnival has chosen to close the sit down restaurants while in ports, which leaves only horrible food choices, consisting primarily of the buffet, yuck. We discovered the burger place was closed during dinner hours, another way for Carnival to save money.With only one "fun day at sea", the island stops were frequent, long enough and varied enough. Carnival continues to increase charges for their excursions however. You might want to avoid paying them inflated prices and chance doing things on your own.Snorkeling in St. Thomas was two locations on sandy bottoms. Without live color reefs there was no marine life to see. Save your money. We took an expensive fishing tour at St. Lucia was awful. Eight of us took turns in the single fishing chair with 10 minute turns. It was us to the quests to organize the timing as the mate did nothing. They advertise only going 4 miles out to sea but went about 15-20 miles out in extremely rough waters. All guests got sick and blessed an early termination of the trip to return to shore. Carnival refunded only a small amount of the costs. Save your money. Hope you don't need a lifeboat as the drill was impossible to hear. You left without a clue what to do in the event of an emergency.