Beware of the balcony rooms with obstructed views.

The dinners and breakfasts were great but the lunches were mediocre. I like to keep it simple when it comes to lunch but the options were too heavy. I also did not like how all drinks were served to you by waiters on Lido.  Carnival has several stations strategically placed around the Lido deck but there were only two that I knew of on this cruise.  Getting something to drink with your meal took too long.  I sat down with my buffet meal and had to wait for coffee, tea, water, and or juice.  Then the food got cold. 

The crew was very friendly.  We had excellent waiters in the any time dining room.  Our waiter Luis was a riot and a joy to be around.  We also had the liberty of making friends with the Head Waiter (Luis) and F&B Manager (Alberto).  We traveled with small children and they made us feel welcome even though the kids were sometimes "difficult" during the meals.  The bartenders in the Club 6 cocktail hour for platinum members were great. Valeriya and Marco were knowledgeable and a fun duo! Our room steward must have had a bad week.  She was somewhat unfriendly and always made us feel like waiting on us was an inconvenience. 

There are no stairs midship and this made it difficult to navigate from deck to deck.  The stairs stopped at floor 7 and conveniently, we were on deck 8.  We had to take the elevator everywhere and it often took a while to get there. 

The balcony was really small and looked bigger in the picture.  Also, we had an obstructed view of the lifeboats, something we did not think would be a big deal but it was.  There were no pictures of these rooms, only pics of rooms above the lifeboats.  They blocked almost all of the sun from peering onto the balcony and we could not see into the sea below us.  It was disappointing.  The room was also really small.  We had two twin beds (which are smaller than twin beds) and a pull-out sofa to fit three people.  When the sofa was pulled out, you could not access the balcony or the fridge.  The toilet paper was placed in the worst spot possible, under the sink right above the garbage can.  It was very difficult to reach and I have no special handicaps. If the roll overran, it ended up in the trash.  Terrible room design. Had we known the rooms were going to be like this, we would have opted for a rooms above the lifeboats. 

Sabatini's was good, but overrated. We only went because we had a voucher from our travel agent.  I would not go back without a voucher. The pizza and grill are nothing to write home about. Alfredo's pizza is great, and should replace the pizza in the pizza bar.