Sorry, Carnival, you need to do better than this!

I know it isn't Carnival's fault that a passenger got ill on the cruise before us that caused them to lose ten hours but we weren't able to board the ship until almost midnight and were exhausted.  We spent the entire day driving around and killing time.  I had to buy lunch and dinner for four of us at a cost of $100 which I hadn't planned on.  I figured we'd be on the ship by noon.   It doesn't do any good to tell us to check in after 9:00 p.m. when you're already in town after having driven for 18 hours to get there.

When we finally got on board, all we wanted to do was go to bed.  At that point, we'd been up for close to 24 hours.  Instead, we had to complete the muster drill and wait for our luggage to arrive.  Speaking of the muster drill, I've been on Norwegian and Royal Caribbean and you could learn a thing or two about how to conduct the drill from them.  There is no reason to have huge groups of passengers standing in line for what seems like an eternity.

I had never been to Costa Maya and was really looking forward to it.  Of course, that port was removed from our itinerary because we essentially lost a full day of our vacation.  We lost the port and the excursion we had booked and, after looking at the line to rebook, decided it wasn't worth it to try to book shore excursions.

Room service has definitely gone downhill.  There was very little to choose from but I did order a tuna salad sandwich and potato salad.  After almost an hour, I received a potato salad sandwich and potato salad.  Really, how did that happen?  Who throws a scoop of potato salad on a sandwich and doesn't notice?

After all the disappointment and hassle, we're supposed to receive a 20% discount on a future cruise?  Really?  20%?  Day one was taken from us and day two was spent recovering from the hassles of day one.  I felt like we had a 5 day cruise instead of a week.

I do want to point out that the staff, as always, was friendly and did their best to deal with the problems and went out of their way to be accommodating but I feel very disappointed with the offer the company has made for compensation.