We really wanted to try the newest ship Carnival had to offer, and were pretty excited about it. I spent 3 days reading the hundreds of reviews on here, a month before we left, so I was prepared, and let me just verify that the running theme in the reviews are pretty accurate!

This was a family vacation for me and my husband and our 3 kids, my parents and my brother. We hadn't vacationed together in over 8 years! That said, imagine the extreme anger and shock when my brother was DENIED being able to board because he thought he didn't need his birth certificate. My dad had misread the information and thought it wasn't needed. Now I know it is a must, BUT my brother has cruised multiple times with Carnival over the last 20 years, which is in their system as we each have a VIFP number. We couldn't understand why they couldn't allow him on board with this information in addition to his drivers license. To make matters worse we were forced to choose to board between 1:30 and 2, so there was no time for him to drive home and get the birth certificate. They said they would even accept seeing a picture of it, but my family didn't think of asking my adult daughter, who chose to stay home, to do this. So my poor brother had to go home :-(.

The first day walking the halls of the Family Harbor , my heart sank, there were food and food stains on all the bottoms of the walls and carpet. My first impression was that the ship was dirty. When we made it to our room my suspicions were on point, there was crusted food stains in several places on the carpet, walls were dirty, everything was covered in a layer of dust, the toilet seat cover had poop splatter :-( , there were suspicious brown splatters on the bathroom walls, weird orange crust on the wall underneath our towels, AND the bath tub edges were full of mold/mildew, and that half bath smelt like it as well. To add insult to injury our cabin steward failed to properly prepare our room: we had no menu, no pen (which was annoying when we needed to fill out our disembarking tags) no welcome papers, no identifiable waters for us as repeat cruisers, and my luggage was not delivered until after 7pm...5 hours after we boarded. I spent the first 30 minutes cleaning my room with hand sanitizer and Lysol spray (travel size). I tried scrubbing out all the food stains, turning the small hand towel black :-/. Not the best start to a vacation. Read more