If you go into the cruise thinking that the Fascination is 17 years older and much smaller with less tech than the Dream, you'll be fine. Your expectations and attitude will dictate your experience.
My wife and I were on Carnvival Inspiration (just Inspiration at the time) in the Western Caribbean in 2000 and we did not find it that impressive at the time. It was crowded, filled with unsupervised kids, and looked well-worn beyond its years. I don't remember anything especially modern about it for the time. The food was marginal, the service was acceptable, the entertainment was something to occupy time at best, and the constant nickling-and-diming was very off-putting. We had significant issues onboard with other guests, as well a major issue on one of our excursions, and none of these things were really addressed by the ship in what I would call a satisfactory manner. Overall, based on that cruise, my wife and I never wanted to cruise again, nor could we say much positive about our Carnival experience. Realize that we had not yet had the pleasure of experiencing
DCL at this point to truly have see how great cruising could be (thank you to our then 8-year old daughter for convincing us to try a
Disney Cruise), but we had done a 7-night Hawaiian cruise on SS Indepedence of American Hawaii Cruises two years earlier and that was an incredible trip. For being an American-flag carrier, AHC had far superior food, entertainment, service, and maintained ship (which was 45-years old at the time), all for a comparable price to Carnival. We even went into our Carnival cruise with lower expectations than our AHC cruise, and Carnival did not fail to disappoint in going below those.
