This was our third Carnival cruise. I thought the first two represented good value for the money. This one did not. The ports and excursions were nice enough, but Carnival scrimped so much on the food and the staff that the on-board experience was quite poor. Imagine Black Bean Soup with 3 or 4 beans per cup. What, are black beans too expensive now? How about Cherries Jubilee with not a single cherry? The cheese sauce for nachos was so thin that you could drink it through a straw. Something they called "lamb" was so tough it had to have been mutton. You could drive a nail with the veal shank. On most mornings, the coffee was so weak you could see through it. Everything about the food and the menu suggested that shaving nickels and dimes had overtaken providing acceptable meals in Carnival's priorities.

The Lido deck buffet is now run for the convenience of the staff, not the passengers. Each night they would only open one side, then watch the line stretch around the deli and back toward the pool. Why make people wait like that just to get entrees that were consistently lukewarm or cold? Perhaps it was to give the staff more time to pick through the Seafood Newburg so they could grab the scallops before the passengers did. No, I am not making that up: we saw more than one of them doing it.

Carnival has taken to playing "gotcha" with various forms of promotions and offers. They give you a coupon for a free drink, but no matter where you take it, they tell you that you can't use it there, or not for this drink, or not on a Tuesday during the full Moon. When the coupons are free, that's one thing, but they did the same thing with drink vouchers they sold for over $5 each. Again, no matter where you took them, there was some reason you couldn't use them. Read more