I've Cruised a lot, this was the WORST!

Embarkation was fine & simple enough.

I started sailing on Carnival in 2006. Over the years I have watched the food go from excellent to absolutely horrible. When a cruises food choices makes you wish you had a gas station cheeseburger opposed to Guy Fieri's burgers, ya have a problem. The pizza place used to be phenomenal, now it's tasteless and highly discouraged. The lido buffet is typically overcooked, sloppy, bland and simply not good food. And the evening dining banquet halls, while nicely themed with a nicer atmosphere, has the same issues with their food - barely coming in at mediocre.

The Valor has little to nothing to offer. The shows were far less than par. We attended the USA rock music show and it was just horrible. The singing was awful, costumes were awful, sound was awful, light positioning was blinding to the upper tier levels making it difficult to see most of the show. There is a violin group that plays a LOT on the main deck next to the customer service desk that is relentless. Granted, they are pretty good, but come on, who wants to listen to violinists while on a Caribbean cruise that much?? Of all of the day activities, we only found 2 mildly interesting - Let's Make a Deal & the Love & Marriage Show. The game boards to Let's Make a Deal were a joke. We paid $50 for 3 game boards, as did many other members of the audience so we all could play along in the hopes of winning money/prizes along with the contestant on stage. The stated potential for "several big winners" was a joke. The audience never saw any big winners, and only a handful of small winners. The love & marriage game used to be hilarious, now its just silly and rushed. I had a couple of chuckles, but they were due to one of the ladies picked to be on stage, not because of the show itself. The pools are TINY so unless you wake up with the chickens, your chances of squeezing into one is slim to none. Same with the hot tubs.

Austin, the cruise director, needs to step down. He is WAY too rushed and comes off as a jerk. He is clearly stressed and his work load is too much for one person. Carnival has put way too much on him for being just one person and it shows. However, if he can't handle the stress of it gracefully, then maybe he should hand it to someone who cans. The audience should never been able to detect his super high stress levels. His personality rums somewhere between being fake excited and mad about it. The stage shows were a joke. They used to be so good, now they are the kind of show you just get up and leave from to go find something else to do or go watch TV in your room.

No children along.

Ida was our room steward and he was awesome. Actually, all the ship personnel was great. But Ida and Anna from Pixels Dream Studios really should be recognized. Just amazing people.

The ship was very clean, I do not recall seeing one area that needed cleaning detail. Or if it did, it already had staff tending to it.

We had a basic stateroom with a balcony. They must have picked the Valors worst room and stuck us in it. We had no air conditioning for the week we were in there. Maintenance was in and out of our room constantly checking the temperature or working on it throughout the day and late into the nights. One of the managers from the customer help desk came to our room and told us to keep our curtains pulled so keep help keep the room cooler which was just ridiculous. I paid extra so that I could lay in bed and see the ocean, not stare at an orange curtain! Another steward manager tried to tell us that we needed to make sure we were keeping the balcony door closed at all times and then walked over to the door and pretended to act as if the door wasn't pulled all the way. That wasn't true, it was pulled together. We aren't toddlers, we know how to close a door. Just absurd! Then, the bed. My side of the bed literally had a huge hole in it dead center of the mattress where your hips and lower back would be. There was absolutely no way of not laying in it. When you laid down, you could feel the "guts" of the mattress pressing against you; very uncomfortable. We told our steward, Ida, and he was quick to put a mattress topper on. That was nice on his part however, the mattress topper was thin and was actually just a mattress cover so, the hole was still there and could still very much be felt. A couple days later he put another on. That evening I pulled back the sheets and counted 5 mattress covers in total so, we weren't the first attendants in that room to complain. Ida was clearly frustrated with hearing the same complaint over and over about that room - no a/c and hole in mattress. And not from just us. Needless to say, we were so grateful to get off that ship and to a place where we could get a good night's sleep. My husband and I both left with bags under our eyes from no sleep, and we don't drink so they certainly wasn't hangover bags.

Way too slow and took far longer than it ever should have.