For this review I will give you the impressions as a couple on our first cruise.
To further qualify our opinion let me state both my wife and I currently work in the corporate end of the hospitality industry and both spent significant time working our way up through the restaurant industry. While not related to our jobs we have maintained a steady pace of about 5 weeks of vacations per year. So while we are novices at cruises we are fairly adapt vacationers.
It was at the urging of our "cruiser" friends that we try a cruise. After a couple of chats with some seasoned pros (15+ cruises each) we selected the Carnival Glory, primarily due to the average age of passengers being a little younger and the Line's reputation as more of a party ship("fun cruise" is the moniker that Carnival utilizes). Having been to most of the western Caribbean on prior vacations, we selected the eastern Caribbean route departing on January 22, 2005.