I'm ok with Carnival, it's low cost, food is fine the staff have always been wonderful. Yeah the lack of classy types is a bit annoying, poeple bunping into you, feet up on the furniture, children running in the halls late hours. All I ask is that when the ship designates a dining room dress code they enforce it!! We like to dress for the dining experience yet look around and t-shirts, flip flops, ...
We chose this itinerary because it was out of and back to San Francisco. SF is our home port so there was no flying and only 1 hour by BART. The other part of our decision and the prime factor is we got to play golf on Santa Catalina in beautiful Avalon. Those alone was were the pluses.
Lines to get onboard were not organized although they tried to make it so. You were to show up at 1/2 hour ...