Vista 8 day April 21st Review

[jamscckmc]

I thought we might have the same itinerary but we have GT but then DI, Aruba and Curaçao. Would love to go to St Kitts sometime.

[kc58ab]

St Maarten:

 

We did the Carnival excursion beach break with city tour. Our tour guide was good he took us around the Dutch and French side of the island. It was quite devastating to see all the damage that is still there seven months later. He took us by Orient Beach which apparently is the normal stop with this excursion to show us the damage so we would understand why they took us to a different beach. We ended up at a resort that was across the street from Maho beach by the airport. The beach was beautiful but the waves were quite rough and made it very difficult to get in the water. I felt bad for the families there with children because there was no safe way for kids to get in that water. The food for lunch that was included was barbecue ribs or chicken, rice, and a small salad. The food was delicious. If you walk down the beach more to the left hand side there water seem to be a little calmer.

 

 

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[kc58ab]

Pics from beach in St Maarten

 

 

 

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[kc58ab]

I thought we might have the same itinerary but we have GT but then DI, Aruba and Curaçao. Would love to go to St Kitts sometime.

 

 

 

That sounds awesome! You will have a great time!

 

 

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[kc58ab]

Hub app, get it! It is free to download and it is so handy to be able to view your account, all the activities listed with locations, menus for dinner, pictures, etc on your phone. It even has the ability to see this info for the following day (I didn’t notice that until the end lol).

 

The chat portion is $5 a device total for the duration of the cruise. Fantastic price right? Yeah if it worked it would be a steal. Sadly it is hit and miss. I concluded it seems to work more often if I deleted previous chain of messages and start a new one. If you don’t have an iPhone where you can get WiFi on apps for $5 a day this is probably still worth $5.

 

Another change I noticed since last year was the $5 a day Wi-Fi for apps. Previously you could pay per day so my daughter would do this only on port days to cut down the cost. Now you have to pay for the full duration up front you can’t do day to day.

 

 

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[kc58ab]

I almost forgot to mention; I was talking to a guy on the Lido deck one day and he was there from the company that does the hub app. He was asking our group how we liked it and said that they are working on the chat they realize there are some issues. He also said they are working on trying to add an indication to the Maps feature on there to show where you’re at now and step-by-step turning instructions to get to where you want to go. I hope that comes to fruition as it would be really handy for people like me who still got turned around on day 8 [emoji849]

 

 

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[kc58ab]

OK I guess it’s time for me to hit on the one sour note I had on this cruise. I will pre-face with I’m still shocked about it as was everyone in my group. I’ve never had this happen before and I surely hope it was a fluke with the steward I had. So Richard introduced himself shortly after I got on board and asked me to select on the card morning, evening, or both room cleaning. I told him my daughter likes to sleep in so evening would be fine, but I would like to have towels in the morning. So later that evening after dinner my room wasn’t cleaned. The next morning I never got any towels, but I still had some left so I went on with my day. After dinner I come back to my room and it’s still not cleaned. So I called housekeeping to let them know that my room hadn’t been cleaned the last two days and that I at the minimum needed some towels. We went to a show and we returned back to a huge stack of towels just sitting on the desk area in the room, still room wasn’t cleaned. I can say the following night my room was cleaned. I can’t say if it was by Richard or not because I never saw him again. I’m sure plenty are wondering did I decrease The gratuities? No I didn’t. Why? Because $4 a day per person is $16 and my time is worth more to me than that.

 

 

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[kc58ab]

Disembarking

 

So disembarking was a little different then I had experienced before. In the past I had the tags by zone depending on the room location, if you had excursion, or early flight. This time they had you pick up the tags according to what time you plan to get off the ship if you were checking luggage. We had a later flight so we had planned to stay on board until most people were off. So I took zone tags according to that which was for zone35 picking up your bags by 10:45. Some of my group got anxious and was wanting to get off the boat early and plan to just grab the bags and have more time at the airport. I tried to tell him I didn’t think that our bags would be down there from what I heard, but I got out numbered by people who have been a more cruises that me saying that they’ll all be down there stacked by zone. Now I can tell you I have seen that happen before the few times I’ve been in Galveston were bags were piled up by the zone number. That is not what happened in Miami they did as they said they sent bags out according to the zone. Needless to say we waited almost 2 hrs for our bags. Not Carnival’s fault some didn’t listen... The other issue was they didn’t hardly have any room to take bags off the belt and people weren’t picking up their bags timely. So we are there waiting seeing tags with 2, 5, and 8 while they were on 20’s. They can’t add more bags to the belt when they’re full so this also prolong the bags getting out sooner. My point to this is just to tell you select your zone according to the time you plan to leave like they instruct, and possibly pick a time 30 minutes earlier or so then you think you’ll need for all those that picked the early ones and don’t show up till the end.

 

 

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[kc58ab]

All in all we had a fantastic cruise. The weather was perfect, very smooth sailing, ate more than we should have, and had many wonderful, personable, hard working employees we got to interact with. The ports were great, lots of beauty to be seen at each one. The Vista was nice, I enjoyed the Art work by all the stairs. I would definitely do the Vista again, although I don’t know I would pay $300 more just for this ship unless I had a Havana room. It is moving to Galveston which is much closer to us so likely I’ll see the Vista again.

 

Thanks for reading my ramblings. If you have specific questions feel free to ask and I’ll try to answer you.

 

 

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[travel33]

Thanks so much for the review! Nice pictures.

I will be on the Horizon next month, so know a lot of things will be the same.

I know my 15 year old son will want to go to the thrill theater. Did you go to that?

Or do you know if you pay a flat fee you can watch the movies as many times as you want, and what that fee was?

I understand the Imax has their own pricing.

Thanks,

Karen

[kc58ab]

Thanks so much for the review! Nice pictures.

 

I will be on the Horizon next month, so know a lot of things will be the same.

 

I know my 15 year old son will want to go to the thrill theater. Did you go to that?

 

Or do you know if you pay a flat fee you can watch the movies as many times as you want, and what that fee was?

 

I understand the Imax has their own pricing.

 

Thanks,

 

Karen

 

 

 

Thanks. I didn’t get to the Thrill theatre, but some in my group went to one and said was $5.50 I believe. I’m not aware of a flat fee to watch as much as you want.

 

 

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[kc58ab]

I thought of another thing I forgot to mention, ice cream. How does one forgot that? I didn’t miss a day without it aboard.

 

I did try the cherry on top. They had several mix ins and toppings. Ice cream itself was pretty good, but a little soft. As she was mixing it together on the counter it was starting to melt and fall apart. Wasn’t as good as cold stone, but reasonably priced.

 

After I tried that I found one early afternoon mid cruise that they have homemade ice cream for free on the Lido deck in the middle of one of the buffet areas. It was very good and the couple of days I tried it they had different flavors. I got to try tiramisu, raspberry, and another one I cannot recall the flavor, but the point is free, real ice cream!!

 

 

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[Clarea]

Enjoying the review and excellent photos!

[kc58ab]

Enjoying the review and excellent photos!

 

 

 

Thank you. The scenery was gorgeous, the photos don’t do it justice.

 

 

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