Let's start with Mary at check in. Mary is tired and it's early and she is already tired. Poor Mary... Poor us... our first taste of "The Pride" is poor poor tired Mary. With 14 family members (twelve new cruisers) we arrive all excited at the Queen Mary check in. Now my partner and I have cruised before and brought all of our family to celebrate a wonderful occasion... my parents 50th Wedding Anniversary. So we arrive early for early check in and walking up to Mary's wonderful little work station we explain to her we are checking in and hand her our boarding papers and tell her we're ready to check in... but a few of our party were still on their way. In her so sweet Mary way... she snapped and I do mean snapped back... "Well let me know what you want to do." and then proceeded yes proceeded to throw our papers back at us! Needless to say I saw my over ten thousand dollar investment... so far... going down like a ship struck by a huge sharp iceberg! I in my so sweet and non high maintenance way said... "oh... now I thought we were at the fun ship check in." To her credit Mary did come around pretty quickly but not soon enough. Her ship had already been sunk... with my parents standing next to me. Thanks Mary for the welcome aboard.
Now it gets even better. Dining it's all that we live for on the cruise ships. My partner and I have enjoyed wonderful new friends and wait staff on previous trips and had talked up the great dining room experience with all the family. Then table 105 came onto the horizon. Pride table from hell. For us anyway. Have you ever seen the movies where they are slopping the hogs and throwing stuff everywhere... well welcome to our reality. Oink Oink. Imagine if you will 14 of us... dressed to the nines... planning for months to really have some fun... then the lights dim and... well our waiter arrives. I think he was ready for a day off about a year ago. I won't go into too much detail only to say... wow... service was absolutely unacceptable. The funny thing... really I'm a nice guy... but wow. Oh and I did have a word with the Maitre d' but he wasn't in the mood to help the customer. But the good news my partner and I did save well over 200 dollars that we tipped Bianca last year! Thank you Carnival Glory... you did it right. Shame on you Pride. Oh the food well lets just say... maybe eating out isn't such a bad idea if you can wait for the port calls! Sub-standard. Really we are nice guys!!!
To the positive... our room steward was "nice"... not exceptional. Really for the money spent and all the people we brought onboard... money would have been better spent flying to Maui for a week. Shoulda Woulda Coulda. Oh and even tackier they didn't give us our fuel supplement back even though it was under 70 dollars a barrel except for 1 of the 25 days.