This was our first cruise with Carnival, and months before we sailed we started hearing bad things about Carnival. It was a terrible cruise line some friends said and nothing would go right. (None of them had ever been on board a Carnival ship.) A relative told me the guests were much younger than we are, and we would be kept up all night by their partying. (However, that relative had never been on Carnival.) And everybody reminded us of the two Carnival ships that needed to be towed back to port in recent years.

Then I looked at the Cruise Critic reviews of the Miracle. They said the food was uninteresting, the shows were amateurish, and the crew was not polite. Many of the reviewers were never sailing on Carnival again; it was just too dreadful!

Our experience was completely different. We found a ship with the best crew we have encountered, we enjoyed excellent food in the Bacchus dining room, and we saw interesting entertainment. Read more