ChiliCheeseDog

The ship was lovely.  The cabin was terrific -- I highly recommend upgrading to a mini suite if you can; the extra space and privacy really made our vacation.  Cabin service was wonderful and everything always spotless.  The food was strictly pedestrian. With very few menu changes.  With only a couple of exceptions, I can't say that anyone in our traveling party (6) enjoyed it at all.  And let's face it, the food is one of the pleasures of a cruise!  Service in the main dining rooms was almost always awful and terribly slow.  I believe staff overall was overworked.  Rarely were you greeted with a smile. The excursions were WAY overpriced; choose carefully.  Most weren't that good.  Headsets that didn't work properly; tour guides no one could understand.  I wish we had used an outside vendor as someone recommended.  However, some of the deadlines were tight and we know the ship won't wait for you if you're using an outside vendor so we elected not to.  We adjusted our tip at the end BIG TIME; something we don't usually do,  We left something for everyone then chose to parcel out our tip where we felt service was merited.  I would not do this tour again on Norwegian; maybe Celebrity.  I talked to some people from a Celebrity cruise that were doing the same tour and they were having so much fun.

Well, we were too early for fall leaves and evidently too late for whales -- no luck with either.  But we thoroughly enjoyed our cruise. Beautiful scenery.   Food was amazing, Cabin attendant was terrific as were the dining staff in the Great Gatsby in the evening.  Frankly, most of the casino staff we had contact with were very unfriendly as were the morning wait staff of the Great Gatsby.  And the front desk staff were hot and cold -- either went out of their way to be helpful or just didn't want to be bothered.  Would we do it again?  Not this particular cruise because I don't think there would be enough to do a second time around; but as far as the onboard experience it was much more positive than negative.  The positives in the staff we had repeated contact with more than made up for the bad apples.  The cruise video is largely a promotion of the ship rather than a memory keeper -- and at $30 BUYER BEWARE!