This was the first cruise my husband and I have ever been on. We selected Carnival because it was more budget conscious and we didn't want to waste a lot of money in case we ended up disliking the entire cruising experience.

We arranged bus transfer from Orlando Airport (we live in New York) to Port Canaveral through Carnival and that went very smoothly. I purchased Faster to the Fun which got us on the ship quickly, although each Carnival employee at the port seemed to have different information. There seems to be a major lack of communication about what to tell guests. Our balcony room was clean but our partition door on the balcony was broken and we were sent through about 6 different people before someone would finally fix it. We only saw our room attendant once on the first day but the room was always very clean at the time we had requested.

The ship looks pretty dated and there was a slight sewage smell on the first day in the common areas (although this did go away for the rest of the cruise). My sister had an aft balcony room and their balcony was absolutely filthy for the whole cruise. In general, the ship was well-kept and clean due to the efforts of the housekeeping staff. Read more