My partner and I have been cruising for about 25 years and this cruise ship probably ranks around one of the worse I've been on. We went with our niece and her son and it was there first time cruising, so we choose Carnival as it would have a younger crowd for them, which it did. However, after the first couple of days it was clear that they somehow have managed to packed so many people onto this ship with little regards to how much public space, specifically outside on the deck where we would have liked to relax by the pool and chill. I've just never seen a deck space that had so many big space taking stuff that IMO just took up space and didn't had any actual fun to the cruise experience. The pool was tiny, and the rest of the deck was crowded elbow to elbow because they just had so much open space taken up by the rides, the mini golf, and all of the other things crammed onto the deck. I think some of these cruise lines (and honestly it had been many years since we had been on a Carnival ship) have just taken away so much open, outdoor space.

Other things - the food was bad. As I've seen over the years it's def a trend taking place on a lot of cruise lines where they want you to spend additional $$ on specialty dining and one way to do that is not only in the buffet, but also in the regular dining rooms, the food is just outright bad. In the dining room where we ate pretty much every night we actually would just laugh at just how small the serving sizes were. And to be clear - we are not large people. We all are healthy, workout, and aren't looking to pig out on the food, but...Carnival still appears to making an actual effort to make the food less appealing so you will spend that extra $$ on specialty dining. We did do specialty dining and it was WAY WAY better, with HUGE portions (more than you could really eat), and the comparisons to the regular dining was just really embarassing.

The shows were good - we enjoyed those (interesting main theater...hard to explain, but smaller but it worked) Read more