This was our second (and last) time on the Glory, the first time with two teenagers. The teen club manager let them play truth or dare with physical contact and did nothing to stop this kind of activity. If you didn't participate in their activities he would call you "gay". Our teens didn't even like going there after the second day. Not enough alternate activity to participate in. We paid extra to have a balcony room but were told on one of the days that we weren't allowed to go out on the balcony during that day so they could clean them. I used to love being a part of the talent show but now they only let you audition to imitate one of their legends and no choice of song. It's okay, except they force you to wear wigs and ungodly outfits or you're out and they treat you like you're a diva if you dare ask not to wear the wig. (I was belittled and caught the costume person talking about me to another dancer). I paid a lot of money for 4 of us to do this, I don't need to be imitated or belittled by some little ship dancer! The ship's excursions were way overpriced. The Purser's desk would take calls while you were in line and then roll their eyes to the customers in line if they person on the phone didn't understand what they were saying. Not only did I lose money in the laundry room but I lost money in one of the machines in the casino and the attendant just shrugged his shoulders and walked away! Our head waiter was great but had to do twice the work of the second waiter and you can't change the ratio of their tips, they are charged together. Best to take cash and have the tips taken off your room so you can tip the people who work hard and not the ones who don't. We did this but when we asked the Purser to change this, we got big attitude. The Red, White and Blue contest was fun but when we went to our "rally" for the white team, as soon as I walked in a dancer smeared white makeup on my face without asking! What if you're allergic? I had to go back to my room and wash it off and missed most of the fun part. Don't fall for the "you can use your cell phone and computer" advertising. Oh you CAN use them, but at a high international roaming on the cell and you have to pay for wifi and can only use it in certain areas anyway. It was my 12th cruise. I had already booked my 13th on Carnival this fall but not sure if I'll actually go. I think I'll cruise Royal Caribbean or Princess instead.

I just got back from my 8th cruise with Carnival. This one was on the Carnival Valor out of Miami. I had some bad experiences starting 3 cruises ago but chalked it up to 'Well, every vacation can't be perfect'. Now though the pattern can't help but be clear.

Customer service at 1-800-CARNIVAL tends to be quite snotty. (Yes, there were some wonderful people as well-- I wish I had their names.) Last year, I booked two balcony cabins-- one for me and my boyfriend, and a second for my parents. There was talk of my boyfriend's mother coming along as well, but she didn't make up her mind to do so until 87 days before the cruise. Still, this was well outside of the time frame, wherein changes would be penalized, given on the reservation confirmation faxed to me by Carnival. It said that I could make changes, without penalty, up until 60 days before my cruise.

I called, at 87 days out, to add her to the reservation. This was no problem. I added her to the cabin I had with my boyfriend and my intention was to then switch myself over to stay in the cabin with my parents. This couldn't be done because apparently, while the boyfriend/mother cabin could accommodate 3 people, the cabin with my parents could not. I asked then if we could all switch out to get me and my parents in the 3 person cabin and my boyfriend and his mother in the 2 person cabin. I was told that this could not be done without me being subject to (prohibitively for me) high fees for making the changes.

It wasn't as if I was asking for something complicated within their cabin allocation system-- they were MY TWO CABINS for which I had shelled out close to $4, 000! Carnival told me that I could only make these sorts of changes unpenalized before 90 days prior to the sail date. I read to them the line about the 60 day policy from my reservation confirmation-- they insisted that it didn't say that! I faxed it back to them and they said: 'Well that's wrong.' ??!!??

For those of you who have sailed Carnival, you'll know that we can not easily exchange room keys and work it out unofficially by ourselves because your key is you identity on the ship. It is relevant to the story to tell you that I have a very timid personality and I am always doing everything I can to avoid conflict. (This usually ends up leaving me walked all over.) I actually THANKED the customer service representative for 'trying' (uh, I mean ignoring that I had the 60 day thing in writing) and hung up.

I then started to get really upset about being walked all over like that when I had this thing in writing and I was already shelling out so much money. I decided to call one more time before dropping it to see if another representative would give me the same story or not. This person was nice-- though timid me was horrified to discover during our conversation that the previous person I talked to had put a note in my 'file' flagging me as a 'problem customer'!

He told me that, under the same 90 day change policy the earlier person quoted me, rep 1 should not have allowed me to add the extra person in the first place. (I guess he made an exception since it was more income for Carnival eh?) Rep 2 eventually got the changes made but added the zinger that 'My manger wants you to know that no more changes will be made for you.' This left me with a very bad taste in my mouth considering how excessively polite and non-demanding I am.

Anyway, on to the commonalities of the last three cruises.

Food: As many have said before here on this site, the food is very cold and usually greasy. I was sooooo craving a hot meal when I got home today. There were also several wonderful food selections, especially in the formal dining room, but still they were always freezing!

Service in General: As one of 3, 200 passengers on a ship that turns over to a new 3, 200 passengers each week, with staff that spends months at a time serving and cleaning up after all of them, I am under no illusions that I am 'a special guest' and I understand that the staff members may not be feeling properly rewarded. However, this is an expensive trip for guests and many Carnival employees need to work on the illusion.

-Waitstaff, bartenders, and food service workers on the Lido deck seemed permanently pissed off.

-The cruise director and his staff leading activities made no effort to conceal how hokey and repetitive their jobs are. Several times I saw them openly mocking guests behind their backs. (If that sounds like a contradiction, what I'm trying to say is that it is not the good-natured joking kind of mocking for the entertainment of guests.)

-Housekeeping was very shoddy and inconsistent. Every single evening I failed to notice that my pool/beach towels were taken away (when they should have been replaced or even left alone) and had to run around like crazy in the morning to try to find new ones minutes before my shore excursions were scheduled to leave.

Service the last night: This is my biggest gripe!!! There are usually several activities and fanfare on the second to last night, but what about the last night?! I am still on vacation and I feel robbed of an entire evening of it every time I go on a Carnival cruise! The service then is completely non-existent and nothing is going on. It is as if they are saying-- go to bed after dinner so you will have an easier time waking up so we can kick you out of your cabin first thing in the morning!

The famous towel animals are noticeably absent on the last night. Several things, for example the ice cream machines, are not replenished. The late night buffet selection is very very meager. The ship becomes very empty looking-- the staff disappear and I guess that the guests retire to their cabins since nothing is going on. The usually attentive formal dining room wait staff always seem to make themselves scarce on the last night. This year I went on this cruise with a first time cruiser. I never mentioned my thoughts about this 'last night phenomenon' to him but he certainly picked up on it and asked me if it was always like this. Unfortunately, I had to say yes. :(

My wife and I are booked on a cruise to Mexico which leaves on January 9th, 2008.

About two weeks ago my wife fell off a ladder and broke five ribs. I am 78 years old and she is 73 years old. At our age that is a pretty serious injury, of which I am sure you are well aware.

My wife called Carnival and explained the situation. She then asked if it were possible to postpone the cruise to a later date. She was informed that to cancel the cruise would entail a fee of around six hundred dollars. My wife explained that she does not wish to cancel the cruise. We are both very much looking forward to this cruise. She was told that it did not matter, she would still have to pay that fee if we did not go on the cruise as scheduled. The person she spoke to kept saying that this was the standard cancellation fee. The person she spoke to would not accept the fact that we did not want to cancel the cruise. We simply wished to go at a later date due to my wife's injuries. The person she spoke to became more and more belligerent bringing my wife almost to the point of tears. This person finally just hung up cutting my wife off in mid sentence.

To take a seventy-three year old woman who has suffered great trauma and severe physical pain, verbally abuse her and then hang up on her as she tries to explain her position, is certainly no way to engender good will and insure future business for The Carnival Cruise Line.

My wife is determined to take the cruise no matter how sick she may be because we cannot afford to spend that much money on nothing. But you may rest assured that anyone we meet on that cruise will know how The Carnival Line treats its senior citizen passengers.

My husband and I recently cruised on the Carnival Freedom, a brand new ship which departed from Rome, Italy. This was our dream vacation, a 12-day Mediterranean cruise visiting Italy, Croatia, Sicily, France and Spain. But our dream trip quickly became our worst nightmare. It all began when we missed a connection stateside due to weather delays. We were put on another flight and our bags were lost in transit. When we arrived in Rome, we immediately made a claim with our airline and we did the same thing on-board the Freedom. We were assured that our bags would likely catch up with us in the first or second port. They didn't. In fact, my husband didn't receive his luggage for 10 days!! I never received mine. Upon arrival at the Rome airport on our way home, I was finally able to locate my luggage which according to the airline sticker had been sitting at that airport for 11 days!!

On the Carnival Freedom, we were repeatedly told by the pursers Carnival had agents in the airport checking for bags daily. If that was the case, why were they unable to find ours? Maybe because they weren't actually looking?? My bag had a carnival tag on it with the ships name and my name which was visible from the top of the bag. In addition, there was another tag with my name and address visible from the outside, and a copy of my passport was placed inside the bag. The bag was being held by the Spanish airline, Iberia, who we were originally scheduled to come to Rome on. However, when we missed our connection, we were put on Air France instead. We repeatedly asked Air France agents as well as the carnival pursers to tell their people in Rome to search with Iberia. Apparently, they didn't.

In addition to the baggage trouble, Carnival refused to do anything to make our plight a little more bearable. Specifically, we asked if they would wash our clothes for us since we only had 2 changes of clean clothes, which got a little stinky after a few days. They refused. In addition, while in Venice, we were told our bags had been forwarded there, but the customs agents were refusing to release the bags to Carnival. So we asked if they would pay for a transfer for us to go and get our bags. They said no. We went with two other couples who were also missing luggage and we paid 70 Euros for this trip. We took taxi's. We didn't find our bags there, but the other couples did. Carnival refused to reimburse us.

Upon our return to the States, I wrote two letters, one to Air France and one to Carnival detailing the specifics of our trip and asking for compensation. From Carnival, we requested to be refunded for half of what we had paid for the trip. We just received a letter back stating that they are not responsible and cannot offer any compensation. Typical. Needless to say, we will NEVER cruise with Carnival again!! Not only that, we will make it our life's mission to make as many posts we can and tell as many people as we can how awful our experience was in hopes that they will never cruise Carnival either. We were grossly disappointed with everything about this cruise. Besides the baggage, everything was over-priced, the service was mediocre and the people were often rude. I hope that everyone considering a Carnival cruise will seriously consider going with a different cruise line. We went with Carnival because it was the cheapest. We now know why.

C. N.

Delay of departure-late ports, lack of customer service.

We went on a Carnival Ecstasy cruise to celebrate a big milestone in our family. The previous Ecstasy return voyage was several hours late, and we were the last in priority of the three cruise ships to load potable water for the trip, the port water pressure was very low so we left over 8 hours late. I could fill a thousand milk jugs one drop at a time in the time it took them to load our ship up. We missed our first port of call (Cozumel) by 10 hours, and had only a small amount of daylight there, depending so we had most of the excursions cancelled or shortened on dock as we lined up to leave. Because of the high number of excursion cancellations ,we waited for over an hour to attempt to find another excursion and alot of passengers were hopping mad by this time. Amazingly, there was no one to assist us, as everyone had scattered when the complaints started rolling. There were also water pressure problems on the boat during the cruise, resulting in either no water (all morning) to rusty water later. Because of the need to make up for time, the boat was pushed to its max limits, causing pitching and rocking that made us sick the entire first part of the trip. There was NO compensation for the missed excursions/late port of call. The second port was also abbreviated due to "unforeseen circumstances with the port authorities waiting to approve our docking" (why do we have to wait over an hour if they know we are arriving? Whats THAT all about?). The lunch buffet was crude- vegetables , some hard tack made of masa and watered down alcohol.

We returned to the ship, and requested our money back, the lines were always long at the Shore Excursion booth, with only ONE person attending at excursion times, and during complaints. When you finally got to the head of the line, they either sent you back to the info booth to repeat the story again, and then you were told to return at a later time, wait your turn again that you had to come back when the purser was there and available to answer your questions. We were finally told we HAD we had to complain to Miami, that they were NOT authorized to reimburse any amounts to customers. Now we are being told by Miami that if we did not correct the problems and notify the purser to remedy them immediately, once we left the ship the complaints will not be resolved.

There has to be some sort of guarantee of performance these cruise lines are required to provide. If not, someone needs to put forth the effort to put them out of business until they deliver what they promise. I am certain we will never receive compensation, and the promise of 10% off our next cruise is a JOKE.

Will someone respond to our complaints? If so, I will be happy to respond with a rebuttal here that confirms THAT THEY ACTUALLY CARE. I would not hold my breath that this will actually happen.