DennisT

I got back from a cruise on the Carnival Fantasy yesterday, and I had a great time, Gede and Carlos were great in the Celebration Dining Room, and after the first two days Ratna was great serving drinks. Inyoman and Mohammad kept our suite in great shape and made sure we had everything we needed. The room service staff kept my nephew in chocolate cake (27 times) and whatever else he ordered. The shows were great with the exception of the comedian and the ventriloquist who should have missed the boat to get more laughs. The food on the Lido deck was mediocre, the drinks all were concentrates that had the horrible ships water used in them. Apparently Carnival has decided to provide lousy tasting water and drinks on the ship to force the sale of cokes and alcoholic drinks. I wondered why the bars used cans instead of fountains, and it must be that the water on ship would ruin the drinks. Even the coffee in the specialty bar was tainted by the ships water supply. There were no specialty restaurants on the ship. The Celebration dining room electronic menu advertised Beef Wellington and Baked Alaska on the dated menu every night, but Beef Wellington was never available and Baked Alaska was only available on the last night. While we were out at sea, the ships phone system set all cell phone dates to mid October 1999 and about 14 hours and 23 minutes off time which rendered all the alarms settings useless. One of the two drink machines in the Windows by the sea buffet lines was temporarily out of order for the whole cruise and the ship staff regularly stopped use of the one working machine to fill pitchers for the bars or drink service kart (that never once came by my table). The universal lounge waiters were hard to come by and didnt return with drinks 2 of the 4 times I found one and placed an order. The bar tenders at the casino bar were always attentive though, but I had to carry 3 drinks at a time back to the universal lounge which require 2 or 3 trips. Getting off the ship was a fiasco, our VIP status ended at boarding, we had no ability to get off early, when I fly first class, I get to leave the plane first, but not on Carnival. In addition, we were given false information by the cruise director, she said that if we were going to get off the ship carrying all of our baggage, we could leave at 7:15 to 8:45, but when we tried to do that we were stopped and told we had to depart by decks, she only said that general debarkation would be by decks, not the self debarkation. When we did try to depart, there were no directions for departure posted, fire doors that had never been closed were closed and there were lots of blind hallways that used to go through. After the upper deck was called it took an hour to leave the ship standing in line.