This may go on a bit, apologies in advance.

After a long and stressful year my partner suggested we book a cruise as our first holiday together without kids in 19 years. She spent a long time looking for something we would both enjoy and in the end we booked our first ever cruise through Virgin holidays. They did a wonderful job of selling it to us, including telling us that the Dream was a brand new ship. One of the deciding factors in picking this cruise was that the Virgin rep told us that the food would be excellent and that there would be no trouble catering for my partners need for a gluten free diet due to her Coeliac disease ( more on this later). We asked about getting an all inclusive package and were told it was no problem but that we'd need to do this as an "upgrade" to our cards once on board.

We'd not heard of any problems with the ship nor did we see the watchdog report. It wasn't until we were sat on the plane waiting to take off (thank you French ATC for giving me the the chance to sit on the tarmac for an hour getting cramp in my knees) that we found out that there had been any problems when we overheard other passengers talking about it. Read more