cmaguire

We very much enjoyed our recent Christmas cruise on the Norwegian Getaway!  Once we were aboard the ship, everything went smoothly.  The food and service were great in the complimentary restaurants, and 2 of the shows were spectacular!  The "Burn the Floor" dancers were amazing, and the Broadway show, "Million Dollar Quartet" was excellent.  Our only complaint was that each show was repeated a 2nd night (perhaps because this was a large ship & they wanted everyone to be able to attend?), so that limited the variety of entertainment in the theater.  The musicians/bands on the ship were also great, however we were disappointed that the "jazz & blues club", Fat Cats, never had any jazz or blues, and the Bliss Lounge had a DJ rather than live entertainment.  The comedy club was fun, as well as the dueling pianos. 

The shore excursions were also good overall, however we booked them through Norwegian and there were large numbers of people on most of them.  The "Underwater Sculpture Garden" was a huge disappointment (Great Stirrup Cay), as there is NO underwater sculpture garden, and it isn't expected to open until sometime in 2017, so this was falsely advertised.  Also, although we had very good snorkeling during the "Wreck & Reef" snorkel tour on Grand Cayman, it was supposed to be 45 min. of snorkeling at each site but was actually only about 30 min.  The same was true of the bamboo river raft tour in Ocho Rios, which was supposed to be 90 minutes, but was actually only an hour.  Nonetheless, both were enjoyable.  We were less satisfied with the 3 snorkel site tour in Cozumel.  There were about 40 people on the tour & the guides wanted everyone to stay together & follow them, which meant that everyone was in one large group & kept bumping into and kicking each other, which was very frustrating.  It would have been much more enjoyable if the guides had told everyone the general area to snorkel & let everyone explore on their own, as we did in Grand Cayman.  Also, one had to go through a shopping mall from the pier to get to the street area, which was annoying.

The major complaint we had about this overall excellent cruise was the boarding process.  It took us over 2 hours to get on board the ship.  The lines were VERY long & slow, and once we got inside the terminal, there were no health forms available in English, so we had to wait 15 min. for them to print more, then wait in additional huge lines.  The whole boarding process was extremely slow & there were not enough staff to accommodate the large number of passengers trying to get on the ship.  Also, we were able to disembark by 9 a.m., but had been told not to book a flight home until after 4 pm, so we had to sit at the airport from 9:30 am until 6 pm, which was a lot of wasted time, as we could have actually been on a noon flight, had we not followed the cruise line recommendations.