We booked this cruise shortly after returning from another one on the Elation. We had such a great time that we could not wait for another one. Let me preface this review with we had a great time on this cruise. Although this was the vacation from hell in many aspects, we had fun and would do it again. Let me start by giving you a brief history of booking this vacation.

We originally booked on the Paradise for a 7 day 4 port trip. A couple of weeks later, Carnival cancelled this trip. We rebooked on the Inspiration leaving the latter part of September. A month later, this itinerary was cancelled. We rebooked again on another itinerary but had to cancel because of work schedules of some of our group. We learned that the Inspiration was available with the same itinerary that we wanted, just a week earlier, so we booked that one. During this whole ordeal, our travel agent was awesome and took care of all the details including switching flights and such. In speaking with the travel agent, she told us many times that this was very uncharacteristic of Carnival to change so much. You also need to understand that there was a large group of us travelling together. The majority of us work together in a small Police Department. It was very difficult for us to arrange our schedules to be able to take this trip. After several months of frustration and switching around several of us wrote letters to Carnival voicing our frustrations. To this day Carnival has not acknowledged our complaints. Our travel agent spoke with her Carnival Rep several times about the problems we were having. The Rep would not call her back and was not very helpful.

Let me skip to the actual cruise and I'll let you know how this all turned out in the end. Read more