My wife and I took the Westbound Transatlantic on the Disney Magic. We were in stateroom 8058, a veranda (balcony) room. We have only done one other cruise before, a Princess cruise in 2009, and the Disney Magic Transatlantic cruise was superior in almost every respect to the Princess cruise. Disney does this cruising thing very well!

Our Magic balcony stateroom was much larger than our Princess balcony stateroom (Disney claims the Magic stateroom was 260 sq ft including the balcony). The Magic cabin was well laid out, with a comfy queen bed, plenty of storage, and plenty of seating. The toilet area was separate from the bathing area, and both had sinks -- a very nice arrangement. I had read some other complaints on this site about noise in other reviews of the Magic, but we had no external noise problems as long as we we kept our balcony doors closed. In fact, we had a German couple in the stateroom next to ours with a child who had a piercing scream (which he sometimes let loose on the balcony), but we could not hear anything from the child -- or any external noise -- once the doors were closed. Our room steward , Ariah, was great, and he kept our room very clean. My wife enjoyed the different towel animal creations left every night in our room at turn-down time.

The food was generally excellent. The evening sit-down meals were pretty much always fresh, innovative, and tasty. In fact, I was sort of wondering if they could keep the evening meal quality up over the five straight sea days between our last European island and our first Caribbean island, and they almost did it -- it was not until day nine of the cruise (and consecutive sea day number four) that my wife got a fish entry that was less than stellar. Also, our dinner servers, Pedro and Jason, were top-notch -- quick, and both with an excellent sense of humor. Read more