Had an amazing cruise and just want to share a few of my thoughts and observations. Just my opinions of course 🙂
Embarkation was easy peasy. We had 10 AM arrival appointment and sailed right through the process. We had boarding zone A3 (no status, just luck). Didn't notice the exact time we boarded. I was too excited to be stepping onto a ship again after more than 2 years.
I had completed Verifly for the three of us. It was a little cumbersome to complete at home-- I had to manually enter our vax info. One helpful hint I picked up here: open the app and pull up your profile before entering the terminal. I had all three of our profiles on my phone. The agent gave each profile a glance then waved us on through.
We did our muster as soon as we boarded, since it was on deck three forward in Meridian MDR. We waited till there were about 8 and then watched the life jacket demo. All done except for watching in room video as we unpacked.
Loved our cove balcony 2277. We only had a bit of noise one evening from the atrium, and when DH turned on TV we could no longer hear the noise. There was some sort of event that evening in atrium, so louder than usual.
I LOVED the new elevator system. I learned how it worked from the fine folks here. We were out and about a lot, and I can only recall a handful of times that the elevator felt crowded. Even then it wasn't the clown car experience we disliked so much on other cruises. It was mostly only the three of us. We never had to wait more than 3-4 minutes, and usually only a minute or two. There were a couple of times we waited by choice since the cars had folks on scooters or walkers and we didn't want to crowd them.
We had a much better experience with the dining app than we had on our last cruise on the Magic. They had the system down pat and it worked very well for us.
Crew was outstanding, food was good, shows were awesome. Don't miss Celestial Strings show with the Playlist cast performing with the violinists. Top notch IMO.
Was the cruise perfect? No, but it was darn close and Horizon is my new favorite ship. Donkey was our CD and he is tied with Mike Pack as my overall favorite.
Most aggravating thing? Seeing the long lines at Guest Services the day gratuities were charged. IMO, they make it too easy.
Thanks for reading my ramblings, and thanks for all the helpful tips I picked up here. Two more days till we hit Platinum--that will happen in Feb on Mardi Gras (unless Carnival raises the bar 😖 😆)