OVERALL: Positives: high quality cabin, spotlessly clean ship, reasonably good food. Negatives: poor entertainment, crowded ship. With the same quality cabin I would consider cruising with Carnival again, but might not choose it over Royal Caribbean.
We're in our late forties. This was our fourth cruise, our first on Carnival. We've been on Royal Caribbean twice and Cruise West once. We chose this cruise because we wanted to be able drive to Galveston. This was the only one-week-cruise going out of Galveston over the Thanksgiving week. I'd heard mixed reviews of Carnival, so I was not sure what to expect. Overall, it was better than I expected. Note: as the cruise is out of Galveston, the passengers are 75% Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma. This is not the cruise to meet people from a wide variety of places.
EMBARKATION: excellent - VIP check-in is very easy and stress-free, available to us because we had booked a suite. We got to Galveston at 11.30am. Husband dropped me at the terminal with the luggage and then parked at EZCruise. It took him five minutes to walk back to the terminal. This saved waiting for a shuttle with luggage at EZCruise. A terminal porter took our luggage away almost as soon as I had got out of the car. We waited maybe 15 minutes to get through the initial security check. Then upstairs to put carry-ons through the scanners, then to VIP check-in. No line. Because we already had all our documentation correctly completed (apparently this is not always the case, even though the instructions on the web-site are very easy to follow) we had our Sail and Sign cards within two minutes and went to join the line to get on the ship. Another 15 minutes and we were on board. Cabin was not ready yet, so we had some lunch on Lido deck. 1:30 we could get into our cabin, some of the luggage was already there, the rest arrived by 4pm.