We sailed on the Destiny on 10/17. We had a great time. There were four of us. Two adults and 10 year old son and 14 year old daughter. First I would like to say we have found most of the reviews and the info on the boards to be right on. You also have to realize that some people will never be happy and some people will have unrealistic expectations. I'm not going to cover every detail. There are enough other reviews out there that cover just about everything you need to now. I'm just going to cover some highlights and differences we noticed.

This was our 9th Carnival cruise and we have had a great time each time. There have been some minor complaints but that's it. We go expecting to have a great time and we do. We had two balcony cabins on deck 7 and didn't have any "interesting" smells. We didn't see rust on the ship ( and I really looked after reading review complaining about the rust) and everything was clean. The carpet in the hallways is really showing is age but they kept everything clean. There was a difference between cabins one of them had an old TV the other had a Flat screen and one of the cabins had lose cabinet doors and poorly patched holes in the wall by the balcony door. The binder with ship info and the room service menu is gone. Now you just get a piece of paper with some info on it and the room service menu is on the back. One of our cabins was in great shape with a flat panel TV and our cabin next door had an old TV and poorly patched holes in the wall by the balcony door. It also had very loose half hanging doors to some of the cabinets. We never saw the room steward but he did an excellent job cleaning our cabins. A couple of time he forgot ice and we had to call room service. This was a first for us.

The new menu was fine and we tried some of the new items like Gator tail and a couple of others. For the first time we had a terrible head water and his assistant wasn't any better. The tables around us with different waiters had quicker and much better service. The food at the buffets was good and the food on the lido by the pools was the same as always. Hey Carnival it's time to add something different beside hamburgers, hotdogs and chicken strips. I think "Showtime" was cheesier than ever but I'm not a fan of having the waiters sing and dance. We had a magician come by our table one night and he was amazing. We noticed that tables were not cleaned as quickly as normal on the lido deck and there were fewer drink waiters on the lido deck. All of this seems to be a result of Carnival cutting back on crew. Read more