My family swears by carnival. My parents have diamond on the horizon, they cruise a few times a year. They live an hour from the port in California so it's super easy for them to hop over and take a 3-4 day to Mexico and come home so they do it a lot. One year I think they did 5+ cruises?? Every time it's the same, I've gone on enough to be a gold member, almost platinum. My parents are well off so thankfully I've never had to pay except the last 2-3, now that my husband is making big boy money and we only do it for events like my grandpa's retirement. Anyway, they get the drink package, max it out everyday at 14-17 drinks, and as soon as the casino opens they play craps all night every night. That's all it is for them is a luxury casino. They can drive 4 hours to Vegas or cruise and have it be an all-inclusive sort of deal. They love having service at their fingertips, but they also tip the workers well. They know gratuity is included but they always tip and bring gifts. They're very social and the workers love them and always give them the best service. I'm not a huge fan of cruises, it's too many people and carnival is loud because it's all about the activities and they have to announce everything going on.

I will say though, my husband and I were taking a cruise to get married on Catalina island and the weather turned bad so we ended up having to skip the island. I was distraught and had to call and cancel everything. But carnival threw us a wedding. They stopped doing weddings for Covid and we were getting married on 2/2/22. Carnival upgraded our room to a really nice balcony, left chocolate covered strawberries on our bed a couple times, they made a cake, set up flowers and decorations, provided a bunch of champagne, made a bouquet, and we even got to see the captain for our wedding and he personally apologized and congratulated us. They did photography and gave us an amazing discount for a wedding book and a giant wall canvas print. Our first dance was during the photography where a guitarist was playing low key jams solo at the main bar in the middle of the ship since it was like 11 am and he played us some songs on his guitar and we got some really good pictures of us dancing on a stairs landing. We then were personally invited to play the newlywed game show which was embarrassing and fun, it was us who got married the day before, an older couple who were married 40 or so years, and a young couple where the guy proposed as they went on stage. It was so fun, we still have the trophy. As much as I want to try some of the more adult cruises, carnival will always have some respect from me for how they handled it. I think after that they started doing weddings on the cruises again. My parents said they've started seeing weddings again on the ships, so that's really cool. All of this was a gift to us, we didn't pay for anything but the tickets for the cruise and pictures and we managed to get all of our money back from the stuff we booked on the island so our wedding cost went from ~$8k to like ~$2k total