Jim Zim's Full Review: Carnival Vista 8-Day Southern Caribbean in a Havana Suite

[Spaniel Lover]

Another interesting casual dining venue I had not previously seen on Carnival

was the Seafood Shack near the aft pool on Lido deck.

 



I liked their clam chowder,

although the bread bowl they served it in seemed old and stale.

They shouldn't leave the bread out exposed to the air all day.





The Seafood Shack has a nice little casual dining area located right next to it...

 







On any cruise ship, there are always many choices of bars to get a drink at.

One of Carnival's that I'd like to shine a light on is the Blue Iguana Tequila Bar.





Buying drinks on a cruise ship is rarely a bargain.

However, the Blue Iguana Tequila Bar is a notable exception.

Look carefully at their menu...



 





































 

 

I wonder how many people sail with Carnival and never discover the big bargain at the Blue Iguana Tequila Bar: A pitcher of Margaritas, enough to serve four people, for only $24.95.

For those who are loyal to Royal Caribbean, you may recognize that price as being less than the cost of two Margaritas on most Royal Caribbean ships!

So, if you're a Margarita lover, my tip for you is to visit the Blue Iguana Tequila Bar for a pitcher.

A second tip is that you don't necessarily have to get a burger at Guy's Burger Joint. If you ask, they will be happy to simply serve you an order of their super-delicious fries. It is not uncommon for me to visit for an order of fries around 3-4 PM, to tide me over until dinner time!

[Spaniel Lover]

A Few Interesting Ship Features

I'm not going to try to detail every feature of the ship, but there are a few things about Carnival Vista that I want to make sure you know about. The first is that it is currently the only ship in the entire world that is outfitted with a genuine IMAX movie theater! They offer first-run movies, and the prices are comparable to what it would cost to see a movie in IMAX format on land. Plus, they offer a senior citizen discount for anyone 55 years old or over!

 

We saw the Tom Cruise movie "American Made" a day before it opened up at our local theater back home. I really appreciated the fact that they don't gouge you on the ticket prices, too. It would be easy for a cruise line to be tempted to do that, with a captive audience and no competition. I saw someone on CruiseCritic complain that the IMAX movies should be offered at no charge on Carnival Vista, but I strongly disagree with that. How many seats are there in that theater? It looks like less than 200 to me. There are 4600 passengers on the ship. If the movies were free, it would be a crowded mess like the comedy clubs can be at the most popular times. Charging admission is the most effective way to match the limited supply of seats with the demand.

 

The lobby for the IMAX movie house and the Thrill Theater.

In case you're wondering... yes, of course they offer movie-style popcorn.

A great spot that a lot of passengers never discover is the viewing area at the forward end of the ship. There are actually six of them on Carnival Vista. You'll find one on each of the following decks: 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, and 11. Just walk down the passenger corridor on any one of those decks, and go all the way to the front of the ship. You'll find a door with a little window in it, that leads outside to these viewing areas. If the ship is in motion, the doors might be locked due to excessive winds. When the ship is docking, or as the ship sails away from Miami, or any time the ship is docked, it's a great place to see a spectacular view ahead of the ship. Photographers: this is the place to go as the ship sails in or out of any port! The official term for these areas is "forward viewing areas" but on CruiseCritic they are generally known as the "secret decks"... since they're not really publicized by Carnival and rookie cruisers usually don't find these.

 

This next photo, an aerial view supplied by Carnival,

offers a good look at all those forward viewing areas:



 

In case you're wondering about that Jacuzzi at the bow of the ship... that's for crew members, only. Something I find fascinating about the front end of the Carnival Vista is that for whatever reason, the ship's designers chose not to put "Captain's Suites" directly above the bridge. "Captain's Suites" are not cabins for the actual ship's Captain to sleep in... they are very large suites that certain ships in the Carnival fleet have directly above the navigational bridge. My wife and I stayed in one on the Carnival Sunshine, and it was pretty cool! They feature huge picture windows with an amazing view forward, as well as an extremely large balcony with a spectacular 180 degree view.

Take a look at a video I made in 2013,

which gives you a tour of the Captain's Suite on Carnival Sunshine:



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If you'd like to watch the video in HD on YouTube,

I don't know why they decided not to put Captain's Suites on the Carnival Vista. It's easy to spot them on any of the Carnival ships that have them. You'll see a row of cabins directly above the navigational bridge, with big picture windows. The Captain's Suites (there are two of them) are at the far left and right ends of that row of cabins I've added an arrow to this photo I took of the Carnival Sunshine in 2013, to point out one of the Captain's Suites:

 

[Spaniel Lover]

Back to Carnival Vista...

Now let's take a look at the aft pool area at the back end of the Lido deck:

 

 

Since we were in a Havana Suite on the Carnival Vista and had our own designated pool to use, we didn't spend any time at the Lido pools, although I did walk through a few times, to shoot a few photos. On all of our other cruises, the aft pool area has been our go-to place for fun in the sun or in the water. The mid-ship pool is a loud, crowded place... but the aft pool is much quieter and doesn't feel as crowded, even when every lounger is in use. I view the mid-ship pool at the place for young people, and the aft pool as better suited to an old guy like me. One day, I walked to the aft pool to shoot a photo and was surprised to see that they had the pool closed...

Seeing it closed like that in the middle of the day on a sea day would typically mean that they are disinfecting it after one of two things happened: somebody accidentally puked in it, or somebody accidentally pooped in it. My bet is for the vomit. I have to admit that I chuckled when I saw this, as this was a cruise I had already jokingly started to refer to as "the vomit cruise". There had been two incidents already, and this was the third. I don't know for sure that anyone barfed in the aft pool, but I think it's a reasonable guess.

The mid-ship pool usually has music playing, and it's also the scene of some funny games and competitions. I found all that interesting during my first few Carnival cruises, but this was my 27th Carnival cruise. At this point, I look for a more relaxing pool scene. The Havana pool was PERFECT for me!

Carnival Vista's mid-ship pool on Lido deck

 

If you can't find an available lounger at the mid-ship pool, be sure to climb the steps to the next level above it... where it's usually a lot easier to find a lounger. If you don't find one available overlooking the pool, just keep walking a little further... there are LOTS of loungers over the entire length of this deck! There's almost always some available down near the SkyRide.

 

[Spaniel Lover]

If you've been on other Carnival ships, you may have seen a candy store known as Cherry On Top:





 

On the Carnival Vista, they had improved Cherry On Top with a great feature I hadn't seen in the candy stores on other Carnival ships: an ice cream station! They can scoop ice cream in to cups or cones, create sundaes, and they even offer ice cream cookie sandwiches.

The new ice cream station in Cherry On Top

Something else I had never seen before on a Carnival ship was these two big ice cream machines in the Lido buffet restaurant.

 

The only time we ever saw these machines in action was at lunch time. A worker told us the machines made ice cream, but a passenger said it was gelato. I'm not sure which was correct... and frankly, I'm not sure I understand the difference!

[Spaniel Lover]

In the evenings, on Lido deck, they show movies on the big screen by the mid-ship pool. They're not current releases like they show in the IMAX theater, but more like what would be considered a new release on Netflix or Redbox. But what they have going for them is free admission, and free popcorn, too. Here's one of the best places to watch the movies from:

 

 

 

These seats are also good, but you do occasionally have people walking by in front of you:

 

 



 

 

[united4life]

Jim. I love the detail of your reviews. Your website is top notch!

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Forums

[Spaniel Lover]

One of the most iconic features of the Carnival Vista is the vortex video thingie. If you've read anything about Carnival Vista at all, I'm sure you've seen pictures of them. Did you know that there are two of them? There's one in the main atrium lobby area, which is three decks tall... and there's one in the middle of the casino, that's two decks tall. As you walk along the promenade on deck five, one of the most travelled paths from the front of the ship to the rear of the ship, you can't miss it popping up out of the casino.

 

It looks great from a distance, but when you get close to it, you see the pixels:

 

 

I hope that someday, on a future ship, they make a higher resolution version of this so that you could stand up close to it and not see pixels at all. If this was an operating system, it would be Windows 3.0... impressive, for sure, but once Windows 98 comes out, we'll all look back at it and laugh a little.

By the way, the official name for the vortex video funnel thingie is "Dreamscape"... but no one I know ever calls it that. I read that it's made of 3000 individual video monitors that are wrapped around the vortex form.

During our 8-day cruise, I somehow managed to not shoot a single photo of another one of Carnival Vista's most iconic features: the SkyRide. So, for this review, I've had to resort to using this photo supplied by Carnival:

I also didn't end up riding SkyRide during our cruise... the lines were just too long. The next photo shows the line for the ride on the day I went up there in hopes of riding it. But since only two people can ride the SkyRide at a time, the line moves extremely slow. I overheard someone say that the line you see here represented a roughly one hour wait for the ride...

 

One of the big improvements that they made on Carnival Vista compared to the other Carnival ships I've sailed on is that they've gotten away from printing a hard copy of every single photo that the ship's photographers take of you. It was always such a waste! They would print a copy of every photo so you could look them over and buy the photo if you wanted it. They would throw away SO MANY photos over the course of a cruise... and that was a huge waste of photo paper, ink, and time.

On the Carnival Vista, there's none of that. All photos are displayed electronically in the ship's photo gallery, known as Pixels. You look through your photos on a screen, and if there are any you would like to buy, they can print up a hard copy for you.

A small improvement that I noticed in the photo gallery is that you can now buy professional photos of the ship itself, and of some of Carnival's most scenic destinations. There are hard copies of these photos already printed up, in two different sizes, and you just grab one that interests you and take it to the checkout register to pay for it. Seems like a smart idea to me.

 

[Spaniel Lover]

Sunrise & Sunset Photos

As a photographer, I always manage to shoot a few sunrise and sunset photos during a cruise.

Here are a few of the best ones I shot on Carnival Vista.



Most people are in vacation mode and are still sleeping during the sunrises.

I'm an early riser by nature, so I'm happy to show you what they all missed:









 

The thing about cruise sunsets is that they often happen when people are at dinner.

So, a lot of folks miss those, too. Here's one:

 

One morning when the sun was rising directly in front of the ship, I walked to the Serenity deck to get a photo of it and there were actually a few other early risers up there before me...

People had other things to do at 7 o'clock in the evening,

so the aft pool area was nearly empty when I snapped this sunset photo:





 

 

Finally, I want to share a picture from a cruise a few years ago.

I think it's the best sunrise photo I've ever taken:





A sunrise photo I shot on Carnival Freedom in 2015

[Spaniel Lover]

Waterworks

I've had a lot of success on YouTube... ad revenues from my YouTube videos are what pay for my cruises these days... and

was a video I made about a waterslide on a Carnival ship. It's gone on to get an astounding 93 million views on YouTube since I first posted it five years ago!

Because of that, I always visit the Waterworks area whenever I'm on a Carnival cruise ship. For that reason, and also because I'm just a big kid at heart and love to play in a water park!

As I mentioned earlier, we were cruising on Carnival Vista with our friends, Kimble and Liz, and their young daughter, Kat. So that gave me an even better reason to spend some time in the Waterworks area: I got to have some fun with Kat in the water park and in the pool! And I think I got a pretty good YouTube video out of it, too:

5sJwSpxwdpo

If you'd like to watch the video in HD on YouTube,

Kat got a lot of screen time in that video, but I do have to say that the breakout star of the video was the kid in the very last shot, who did the incredible dismount from the waterslide. He's either a natural born athlete, a natural born YouTube star, or possibly both!

[Spaniel Lover]

Cruise Director Schwartz

 

Having done 42 cruises on five different cruise lines, I've seen a lot of Cruise Directors in action. I have to say that Carnival does a really good job at picking the right people for this very important job. The Cruise Director... through public address announcements, appearances before and after stage shows, and at poolside events... sets a tone for the entire cruise. There have only been a couple of Carnival CD's that made me cringe, and a very large number that have impressed me.

Carnival Vista's regular Cruise Director is Matt Mitcham, but he was on vacation the week we cruised, and Schwartz was filling in. That's right... no first name, just Schwartz.

Schwartz did fine, putting a lot of personality in to the job, and being a good representative for Carnival. There was just one thing that I would work with him on if I were his advisor. He's got a little signature move that he uses as his little trademark whenever he makes an announcement or an appearance. At the end of his speech, he says what he'd say at the end of a phone call to a dear family member... he says "I love you". This is funny and quirky on the first day he does it. The second day he mixes it up just a little, by adding another line to the joke. After "I Love You", he pauses for a few seconds, and then says "No, I Love You More". This is funny on day two of the cruise. But it's an 8-day cruise, and he sticks with the joke for every announcement and every stage appearance for the entire rest of the cruise. This gets old. If I was his mentor, I'd urge him to think of an entirely new tag line for every day of the cruise, so the joke doesn't get stale.

While we're on the subject of Cruise Directors... I'd just like to give a shout out to the best I've ever sailed with: Carnival's Jaime Dee. Jaime, the reality of my vacation scheduling is that I usually have to book my cruises a year or more in advance. Unfortunately, the Cruise Director schedule is only published about 6-9 months in advance... so it's impossible for me to plan a cruise on a ship that you will be on. If I could, I'd cruise with you every time!

One other observation regarding Cruise Directors... I mentioned that Carnival does a really good job of picking them. And I've made a couple of very positive remarks already about "The Haven" on Norwegian cruise line. Oddly enough, though, Norwegian seems to be the absolute worst at picking Cruise Directors! I've had one good one in five NCL cruises. So, if a top-notch Cruise Director is important to you, be advised!

[Spaniel Lover]

Internet Access

One of the biggest disappointments of our cruise on the Carnival Vista was the absolutely horrible Internet service aboard. Having been on 42 cruises, I know not to expect the same kind of high-speed Internet service on a cruise ship as we have come to expect at home. But the Internet service on Carnival Vista wasn't just slow, it was incredibly slow. Remember the days of dial-up 28k modems? It was even slower than that, and here's the proof...

The results of an Internet speed test performed on Carnival Vista.

By the way, "Fast" is the name of the site that performed the test.

It was NOT a summary of the results!

Yes, the Carnival Vista really did have Internet speeds of 20 Kbps during much of the cruise. Not 20 meg, 20 K... and that's absolutely HORRIBLE, even for a cruise ship. This surprised me. I expected better from Carnival's newest ship. I've had better on some of Carnival's much older ships. I don't know what the Vista's problem was. It was not that 4600 passengers were all trying to use the Internet at the same time. I made measurements at quite a few different times of the day, throughout the cruise. Even at 6 AM, when almost all of the passengers were asleep, the throughput was abysmally slow. It also had nothing to do with the fact that we travelled way far south in the Caribbean. I made measurements all along the way as we cruised during the 8 days. Even in the most mainstream areas of the Caribbean, the Internet service was dismal.

Carnival offers several different options for purchasing Internet access. First off, you don't have to pay by the minute anymore like you did in the old days. So, you don't have to rush to quickly disconnect to save your minutes for later. I scanned a sheet they gave me that details the pricing of their various plans.

A bright spot was Carnival's Hub App. It doesn't use the Internet, it uses Carnival's Wi-Fi system, and you do NOT have to purchase an Internet plan to use it. The most useful part of the Hub app is the texting feature, which costs $5 to use. I used it extensively throughout the week to coordinate plans with Liz and Kimble and Kat.

One last thing about Internet access:

If you want to experience the state-of-the-art in Internet connectivity at sea, you have to cruise on Royal Caribbean's newest ships, such as Allure Of The Seas, Anthem Of The Seas, Harmony Of The Seas, etc. They use

than Carnival does. Royal Caribbean uses the O3B Networks system of low-earth orbit satellites... and it provides a significantly better connection than you can get on Carnival. On Allure Of The Seas, I got a consistently fast Internet connection during the entire cruise, with a ping time of about 185 milliseconds, a download speed of about 4 Mbps, and an upload speed of about .9 Mbps. That's the fastest Internet connection I've ever experienced at sea.

[Spaniel Lover]

A Hotel I Recommend in Miami

I've been on a lot of cruises out of Miami and I've experimented with several different hotels. I've finally figured out the one that works best for me. It's called the "Holiday Inn Port Of Miami - Downtown".

The top three things this hotel has going for it are location, location, location. It's located a very close to the where the cruise ships dock at the Port Of Miami. If you book an ocean view room, you can actually see the cruise ships out your window.

The view of the Port Of Miami from our suite in the Holiday Inn.

If you look really carefully, you can see three cruise ships in the photo!

When the cruise ships arrive in port early in the morning, they usually come all the way down to the turning basin at the end of cruise ship row and turn around so they'll be facing out to sea at sailaway time. From an ocean view room, you can easily see your ship in the turning basin when it arrives in the morning. (But you have to be a very early riser to see it!)

More important than the view of the cruise ships in the Port Of Miami is the fact that the Holiday Inn is located right across the street from a fantastic complex of restaurants, bars, and shops called the Bayside Marketplace. When you arrive in Miami the night before your cruise, it's so easy to just walk across the street from the Holiday Inn and have multiple choices of restaurants to have dinner at. On many nights, you'll also find a band playing on the Marketplace's stage. There are quite a few bars, if you'd like a drink... and numerous shops.

One important thing to know about the Bayside Marketplace is that the expensive restaurants are located on the ground floor, but if you head up to the upper floor you'll find some less expensive casual dining options. It wasn't until my third or fourth visit to Bayside Marketplace that I discovered that there's a "food court" of inexpensive casual dining venues located on the upper floor of the southernmost building.

While the Holiday Inn does not offer a courtesy shuttle to and from the cruise port or the airport, it is extremely easy and inexpensive to get a ride from Lyft or Uber. As a 60 year old geezer, I resisted Lyft and Uber for a long time and used taxis for many of my visits to Miami. In retrospect, that was a waste of money. Uber and Lyft are hugely less expensive than taking a taxi, and you never have to give the driver cash or a credit card at all. The billing is all automatic, which makes the end of the ride super easy and convenient. I use Lyft for all my cruise transportation needs these days.

See, you really can teach an old dog a new trick!

[Spaniel Lover]

Downloads

If you're researching the idea of taking a cruise on the Carnival Vista,

here are a few documents you might want to download:





Carnival Vista Deck Plans

Fun Times daily newsletters - All 8 days

Entertainment schedule

Disembarkation information

Shore Excursion List

Room Service Menu

Information About Internet Access and the Hub App

Thrill Theater and IMAX Theatre Schedule

"Good To Know" Information, including Self Service Laundry Locations

[Spaniel Lover]

Carnival Cruise Sounds

Have some fun with these! Listen to the Carnival Cruise theme, or play the sound of a Carnival ship horn.

If you're a true cruise junkie, download the audio files (by right-clicking, and saving) and then set your computer to play the ship horn when you get a new email, and to play the theme song when the computer boots up and/or shuts down!

[jimbo5544]

Spectacular review! Thanks for doing it! Professional quality all the way around.

[Spaniel Lover]

Our Future Cruises

We enjoyed four great cruises in 2017, and have three planned for 2018. While that sounds like a small number of cruises by Jim Zim standards, two of them will be long two-week cruises... giving us five weeks of cruising in 2018. Two of our three cruises will be on brand new ships that will literally just be a month or two old when we cruise on them... and the third will be an extended version of the #1 best cruise we've had in all 42 of our cruises. So, it looks like 2018 will be a great year for cruising for us!

Our first cruise of 2018 will be on the MSC Seaside. MSC is one of the largest cruise lines in the world, but not very well known in the United States, yet. To change that, they're building an amazing brand new ship and will be home-porting it in Miami. They tailoring the ship and the experience to the American cruise market, and trying to steal customers from the more popular American cruise lines by offering rock bottom pricing. I put together a video to explain what's so cool about MSC and their new ship:

 

6ZB6vvwlB90

If you'd like to watch the video in HD on YouTube,

One day, during our cruise on Carnival Vista, I got a kick out of seeing a MSC cruise ship cruising along side of us. It was the MSC Divina, which is MSC's current ship based in Miami. As soon as construction is complete on the new MSC Seaside, she'll be taking Divina's place in Miami.

MSC Divina

Our second cruise of 2018 is going to be on another brand new cruise ship... the Norwegian Bliss. NCL is going to be bringing her from the shipyard in Italy all the way through the Panama canal and over to the west coast, where she'll do Alaska cruises during the summer and some Mexican Riviera cruises in the Fall. Kellyn and I, plus one of my sisters, will be getting on the ship in Miami and taking her all the way through the Panama Canal and over to Los Angeles.

Our third and final cruise on 2018 has the potential to be not only our best cruise of 2018, but quite possibly of all time. In January of 2017 we did a five-day cruise in the owner's suite of the Norwegian Pearl... and it was

. It truly was our absolute favorite, so far, due to the amenities of the owner's suite and NCL's luxurious oasis known as The Haven. Five days was simply not enough, so as soon as we got off that cruise ship, I started looking for a longer cruise on that class of ship... but it had to be a cruise that wouldn't break the bank. Found one! It turns out Norwegian Pearl has a sister named Norwegian Gem... and that NCL is going to be repositioning her from her current home port of New York City to her new home port of New Orleans. Repositioning cruises are usually more affordable than regular round-trip cruises... and this one is no exception. So instead of the 5-days in the owner's suite on Norwegian Pearl, we're going to be able to do two weeks in the owner's suite of Norwegian Gem. Based on how much we loved the experience on Norwegian Pearl, we expect our two weeks on Norwegian Gem ought to be the best two weeks of our lives. This is going to be something for me to look forward to throughout 2018!

[Spaniel Lover]

Packing List & To-Do List

Here's my official packing list.

Perhaps this will help you think of things to pack for your cruise.

On a few of the unusual items,

I'll provide a link to the exact version I recommend at Amazon.com





Passports

Airline boarding pass

Cruise boarding pass

Luggage tags

If driving, printed directions to the hotel & cruise terminal

Wallet (I actually forgot this on one cruise!)

Swimsuit

Flip-flops

Waterproof beach shoes

Sunglasses

Underwear & socks (incredibly, I actually forgot to bring socks on one cruise)

One dressy outfit

Shirts

Pants

Shorts

Sweatshirt

Deodorant

Q-tips

Hair brush

Nail clippers

Razor

Medications

Toothbrush & toothpaste

Sun block

Hand lotion

Travel-size Kleenex for the airplane

Lint remover

Lawry's seasoning salt

Laptop computer or tablet computer, including charger

Digital SLR Camera

GoPro

Camera tripod, or selfie-stick

Binoculars

Wireless indoor/outdoor thermometer

6-outlet power strip

MP3 player

Noise-cancelling headphones

A Sewing Kit for making emergency repairs to damaged clothing

Cell phone & charger

Waterproof wrist watch

Clothes hangers





My pre-cruise to-do list:

Stop newspaper and mail delivery

Book shore excursions

Send an email to family members with my travel plans & itinerary

Turn off water to the house to prevent the chance of a pipe break

Turn down (or turn off) the water heater to save energy

Make sure garden sprinklers are on

Make sure house is locked and alarm system is active





On the last day at work:

Update voice mail message to indicate my return date

Update out-of-office email message, and turn it on

Make sure my temporary replacement has an updated desk guide

Put a sign at my desk indicating my return date

 

 

[Spaniel Lover]

That's it! That's all I've got to say, for now. I do have some ideas for one more YouTube video about the Carnival Vista, and if that becomes a reality, I'll post it in here somewhere, and also on my YouTube channel.

It's your turn now... so ask questions, or post comments. I'll check in daily for the next couple of weeks to try to answer your questions and to reply to some of the comments. If you're reading this more than a few weeks after mid-October 2017... I probably won't see your comments, but feel free to talk among yourselves! You can always reach me via my web site at www.jimzim.net

Thanks for reading all the way through a VERY long review!

I hope you enjoyed it.

[TexasRed]

A Tour Of A Very Different Type Of Cabin

Now that you've had a very good look at the Havana area and the Havana suite that Kellyn and I stayed in, I'd like to give you a tour of a very different kind of cabin on Carnival Vista. Our friends, Liz & Kimble (and their daughter, Kat) were staying in an unusual type of cabin known as a "cove balcony" cabin. It's called a cove balcony because the balcony literally sits inside a protective metal cove. These cove balcony cabins are located very low on the ship, on deck 2, and if the ship were to encounter extremely rough seas, deck two is low enough to potentially get hit by a large wave. So, the balconies are engineered in such a way to be able to withstand that... including a watertight door that can be closed around the regular balcony door to keep any water out of the cabin.

Take a look at this video tour of Liz & Kimble's cove balcony cabin:

7TtJHKmUEcs

If you want to watch the video in HD on YouTube,

 



My friends, Kimble and Liz, on formal night

 

 

We have stayed in a cove balcony cabin on the Breeze, and loved it, for a few reasons:

It is very private and quiet, we never heard any noise from our neighbors all week.

We aren't real sun worshippers, I am a redhead and sunburn easily. With a cove, I could sit on my balcony in the afternoons and not worry about getting too much sun, because the lifeboats shelter it somewhat.

At dinner, we just took the stairs up one flight to the MDR.

When returning to the ship, the elevators can be quite crowded, so being on deck 2 made it so easy to just walk back, rather than wait for the elevators to drop off all those passengers on the upper floors.

And last, it gave a great up-close opportunity to watch for pier runners!

 

So, if you aren't one of those that enjoy being on an upper deck in the middle of the action, try a cove balcony.

[sternfanla]

Jim,

As I'm reading your review I clicked on your home page and saw you work at Diablo Canyon Power Plant.

I am working night shift outage at Callaway Nuclear Generating Station. I do NDT Inspections

So we have a little bit in common. and we both love cruises.

[Keith1010]

Great writeup and I love the photos.

Keith

[jimbri]

Great review, photos and videos. Thank you so much!

[Clarea]

Another tremendous review Jim, beautiful photos!

[Spaniel Lover]

My wife has reminded me of one other thing about our cruise that I had forgotten to include in my post yesterday.

Something that has changed since the last time we cruised on Carnival was that they no longer have a mini-bar inside the refrigerator in your cabin... and even if you request it, they won't do it anymore.

It used to be that they kept your cabin's refrigerator stocked with cans of soft drinks as well as small bottles of booze. You were welcome to drink any of it, and your account would be charged accordingly. If you wanted the refrigerator for cooling your own stuff, you could remove the contents of the mini-bar (or ask the cabin steward to do so) and the refrigerator was yours to use as needed.

 

 

 

I used to like to have a Diet Coke from the mini-bar from time to time. On our 2015 cruise on Carnival Breeze, the cost was $2.30 for a can of Diet Coke. That's certainly a high price compared to what it would cost me to buy it at our local grocery store at home (about $3 for a pack of 12) but I didn't mind paying that on vacation since I usually only bought 3 or 4 cans during the length of a cruise.

On embarkation day for Carnival Vista, I noticed our refrigerator was empty, so I asked our cabin steward if she could get it filled up with Diet Coke for me. She told me to call room service. So, I called room service and asked them to bring by four cans of Diet Coke that I could put in to my refrigerator. A little while later, they brought them by. And the bill for those four cans of Diet Coke was $16.62... which meant that not only was I now paying twice what it cost me on my previous Carnival cruises, but also that I was paying over $4 per can for something that I could get for about 25 cents back at home!

Once I ran out of those four cans of Diet Coke in my fridge, I walked over to the bar in Ocean Plaza and bought a couple more... at nearly half the price of having them delivered by room service. So, let that be a lesson to you.

[SMRIZZSTX]

A great review. Love all the details, pictures. Haven't been on the Vista and after this review I am definitely putting this on the list. Thank you