First time, had a blast!

For a first timer, I felt like the process was just as easy as going through the airport. My only complaint is specific to the Vista: the elevators suck, and they're that much worse at embarkation.

I wish there were more seafood on the buffets. The Seafood Shack had great seafood options, but they all costed extra. We did breakfast with Dr. Seuss which was managed very well, but I do feel the main dining rooms in the evening ran a little bit slow. The 24 hour pizza place gets understaffed and can't keep up with demand frequently. Guy's burgers was amazing though!

The pools are small, but the fitness center is very nice, the hot tubs are decently sized and I guess there are enough of them. The water slides were a ton of fun. The skyride and skycourse both were shut down for the majority of our cruise due to high winds, and when they weren't shut down we were out on excurions.

There's a lot to do, but at the same time much of the things that I would have considered family-friendly, such as a halloween costume contest, would have been at an hour where kids could still participate without being overly tired. It was run after 10:00, so we didn't bother trying to be a part of it even though our family dressed up for it. Other than that, the comedians were great, Manoj the magician did some great tricks at the dinner table and during his show, and everything that we saw in the liquid lounge was really good, especially the Love & Marriage show.

Same complaint as I have about entertainment in general, while there's a few kid-friendly things each day, there's opportunities for a whole family to take part in things like 80s night, white night, and costume contests which could have been done earlier in the evening so kids could participate.

The staff were amazing, lots of diversity, everybody was incredibly friendly, and not only do they treat you nice, many of them remember your name so you really feel welcomed by them. I don't have any idea how Carnival finds such friendly and helpful people! I can't say enough good things about Voltor, who saw my daughter being fussy after the confusion of getting on the ship and trying to figure out how things worked, which was willing to offer our room card to us ahead of time so that we could try to get her calmed down with a moment of quiet. He asked us about our room cleaning preferences, and did such as awesome job placing my kids' stuffed animals on each of their beds in creative patterns as if they were his own kids.

I heard a lot of people complain about the ship's layout and design compared to others, but after looking at pictures & videos of other ships I can understand why they complain. It was more modern, lots of white walls, glass, and chrome. My biggest complaint is that the smoke smell from the casino cannot be avoided on most of the fourth floor, and there's not a way to go from forward to aft without passing through it. They could have invested more in an air filtration system if they were going to make transit through it obligatory. Another complaint is that in the water park on the top, in order to get up to the top of the water slides requires walking on finished wooden steps that are quite slippery. There are small rubber grips on each step at the edge, but I see this as a major fault and another material could have been used for safety reasons. Then there's the nightmare of elevators on this ship. 3 different sets of elevators, and they have no intelligence between each of the buttons on each floor. If they had just made it so that the up/down buttons were all practically the same, and had options for decks below 3 and above 10, it would make everybody be able to get an elevator, but instead people go and hit 4 different up or down buttons in the forward set of elevators and they all end up arriving at each floor at about the same time. One button should call for all of them instead of permitting that type of behavior, or even worst-case assigning elevators to primarily be at a certain range of floors for their "home" location. The bottom line is that it could be handled much better. I'll also cover my thoughts on Pixels here since that's really a part of this class of ship: They suck. The people do their best to be helpful, and I understand that even the manager and assistant manager have their hands tied, but I have never seen a photography studio of this nature that doesn't have a "buy it all" option. After really looking through our photos, it was fairly easy to cut down to the best 5 pictures out of over 100 that were taken as well because the photographers don't do a great job of making sure that kids are smiling, even at the kid-friendly backgrounds, or when Ellie the Towel Elephant is out. They will just take the picture and you get what you get. I would have gladly bought all the pictures if they offered the option, but $25 per picture is just insane. Your loss.

The cabin had tons of storage, and the only thing that made it somewhat cramped is that the pull-down bunk bed's ladder landed very close to the bed, making it easy to hit your toe when the room is darker.

I believe it was handled as well as it could be. We were able to grab breakfast, play some miniature golf, and just have fun as a family during this time, but unfortunately things like the Fun Shops, movie theater, Skycourse, pools, and waterpark were all closed during this time which made finding things to do difficult. Once we were at port, the lines were very long but moved along as a good pace.