Once again carnival surpassed my expectations by far making this one of the best cruises I have been on out of the 16 cruises I have sailed on.
We travelled from London to Vancouver on Virgin Atlantic which was a very pleasant flight with great service. Highly recommended. On reaching Vancouver we took a cab to executive vintage hotel near gas town for a one night stay. We got to hotel around 6.30pm. The hotel was adequate but we had a few issues eg. they didn't offer free transfer to cruise terminal which they had promised earlier as it was fully booked, also they gave us rooms on 2 separate floors despite previous requests of same floor. Also our toilet overflowed and had to get maintenance in to get everything cleaned up. There was no bar in the hotel and the restaurant was closed in evening and hence had to go to next door hotel for drinks and a meal. The next day, we took a short taxi ride to the Canada place cruise terminal. In future I would choose a different hotel if I ever sailed from Vancouver.
On reaching the cruise terminal we went through security and US immigration before being told to sit in a designated area until it was time for us to check in. Anyway, the wait was not too long, may be half an hour or so. We had to then queue to check in for about 15mins and once we had our cruise cards given to us we were in the ship by 1pm or so. Cabins were ready so we dropped off our luggage in our beautiful, spacious and well kept balcony staterooms on deck 7 forward and then went for lunch in the lido. Lunch was great with various stations like pizza, chopstix Chinese station, Freshly made sandwiches etc. burgers and chips were being served by the pool area. We signed up for the cheers beverage programme which gave us unlimited alcoholic and soft drinks though the cruise and it was well worth it. With 10 fun sea days we made good use of our package which was $37.50 per person per day.
Nice cabin with easy access to the theatres and lido deck.