We were 3 adults sailing the Carnival Valor on the March 16, 2008 7-night Western Caribbean itinerary. This was our 4th cruise in 18 months; the first 3 were with NCL; this was our first with Carnival. We have had the most pleasant vacations with NCL. Sadly, this was not the case on our first (and last) Carnival cruise. We could not help but compare the cruise to our NCL experiences and Carnival fell short in nearly every aspect.

Our cruise was arranged through a local travel agent that was able to bundle the cruise, flight (to FLL) and transfers to/from the Miami port through a 3rd party holiday travel agency (vs Carnival's own flight and transfer bundles). Once booked, I had the displeasure of using Carnival's website to complete the pre-cruise registration. This painful experience took a very long time due to the fact that the system kept giving me scripting errors (troubles with their system) or telling me my information was missing (even though I had entered it, but the system threw it away). I finally got it entered but had to return to the site a week before the cruise due to a change in my flight details. Again, what should have been a 5 minute job turned into over an hour, having to call their tech support (and wait on hold, getting the wrong person, waiting on hold some more) to find out that you can't change your flight information (despite the system allowing you to "edit" it). Instead, I was told you have to delete it all and re-enter the information with the new details. Why allow someone the option to "edit" when the system won't accept it? I also discovered that their system only wants the first 3 characters of our Canadian postal codes. Why not say so, rather than allow me to enter it all, and throwing away the last 3 characters leaving me to think there was an error in the system and keep retrying? Things were not off to a good start.

Trying to read the 15 or 16 page sailing contract that I had to acknowledge having read and agree to in a window in my browser that presented about 6 lines at a time was also unpleasant. I did discover a way to save the document to a file and read it in a standard page-at-a-time format. I was curious to see if the contract limited the amount of wine we could bring on board. It did not, which pleased me, since this is what NCL allows. You do have to pay a corkage fee, which is fine with me. Subsequently I found out that this contract that I had acknowledged through my digital signature was not the "correct" contract. In fact there is a different contract that does limit you to one bottle per person. Despite having signed the unlimited contract, I was told I had to abide the rules of another contract that would confiscate and discard wine over 1 bottle per person. Concerns of having to abide by a contract other than what I had signed fell on deaf ears. The call from the director of sales, that I was promised, to discuss these concerns was never received. Read more