I got off Vista on 12/17. This was my:
6th Carnival cruise overall
3rd post-covid cruise
1st time on the Vista
I'll start by saying, this was the last "covid cancellation reschedule" that we had so we thankfully got the extra $600 OBC, and we did enjoy some of the ports. Overall it was not a great experience though. Here's my grievances:
Noticeable decline quality of MDR food. My wife and I look forward to dinner every night, but the food was under-whelming (all over the ship actually) to the point that we were just eating for sustenance instead of enjoyment - the waitstaff was crushing it with service, but even they understood the dishes were not good.
The casino on Vista is wayy cramped.. there's no room to walk around, and coming off the Breeze where I spent a lot of time in the non-smoking casino. I did not enjoy spending time in the Vista casino.
The Vista overall felt cramped. It's the largest ship I've been on, but felt the smallest. No dedicated club. Single-level dining (at least the MDR that I was in). Despite seeing that it was bigger, I felt that too much was jammed in instead of giving larger common areas to showcase the size of the boat. There was a comedy club, but comics were moved into main theater most nights. Space just wasn't used well.
Completely a me-issue: This was my first 7-day cruise.. that ain't it for me. I enjoy getting on the boat, going hard for a long weekend and getting off. The crowd was a little bit older on the 7-day cruise as well.. just not our style.
Perhaps the biggest deterrent: we both got covid on-board. This was our first cruise since they allowed non-vaccinated individuals back. Of course I'm not certain that's how I got it but .... *does math in head* there may be a correlation. I'm still on the recovery - I had gotten kind of complacent about the virus because of doing 2 post-covid, but getting hella sick for a few days puts a damper on the experience and gives me pause about considering another cruise. It would make sense (IMO) for Carnival to still offer fully vaccinated cruises on certain ships with non-vaccinated on others so people could still choose to have some level of confidence about overall health on the ship.
We still definitely had moments of enjoyment - the waitstaff is still doing 100% effort in making the vacation a good time, but that's going to be it for us for a while.
When I do book another cruise, it will not be on Vista.