Europe - Northern Europe Cruise Reviews

Very nice itinerary, and particularly enjoyed having two days in St. Petersburg and Stockholm.  Excellent service on HAL, and it's really surprising how good "institutional" cooking can be!  Since there's no other way to describe preparing 5-6,000 meals per day, the crew does remarkable work.

I prefer open seating ,and it was never a problem getting a table when I was ready to have dinner.  It's a wonderful way to meet other travelers, and altho'  having to introduce oneself over and over again is a bit of a bore, I enjoyed the variety of dinner companions.

Took the first baltic cruise in the spring. The sights and stops made were wonderful especially Stockholm.  If I was to do this again I would go later in the year as our temperatures were between 3 and 13 degrees celsius. As a result of the cooler temperatures the upper decks and pool were not used.  I would highly recommend that passenger arrange for a private tour when in 'St. Petersburg rather than taking the tours with Celebrity.  Fellow passengers that did this had a much better experience than we did and no issues with the visa requirements.  Most of the other stops have a hop on hop off bus available at the port which is a good option.  Shows in the theatre were great but i found the food was a little disappointing. 

Generally our cruise was very good. I found that some of the food in the BLU dining room  wasn't as good as it could have been. 3 times the fish was cooked in broth. The cook couldn't find some more interesting recipes?

We only took 3 ships tours, and one we spent 3 hours between leaving time and first stop at the Hermitage. They need to improve the customs area in St. Petersburg.

We picked this cruise based on the itinerary and we were not disappointed.  All of the ports were very good and we wished we had more time in Copenhagen.  The ship is new and very nice.  We were impressed by the good service in the restaurants and bars.  The food was good but only average.  The ship is a little like the airlines, they want to nickel and dime you for everything they can and that definitely does detract from the service.

Nice ship, food was good . Speciality  steak house, Crown Grill was great .Ports were nice, but they did a poor job of getting off the ship in a few ports. Very poor job during tender port.

Lucked out with great weather, considering it was last week of the season in the Baltic.  Nice amount of port time and only 2 sea days.  Very smooth check-in and disembarkation.  Not crazy about some of the menu changes and one day was supposed to be prime rib buffet, but never happened. Liked the Star, thought service was excellent.

Looking back on all the ports, Berlin and St. Petersburg were the only cities  bombed during WWII so it was really amazing to see Tallinn, Helsinki, Stockholm and Copenhagen how they blended historic buildings with sky scrapers. 

The ship (Norwegian Star) was great; the service was amazing; the food not so good!  We were in a mini-suite on Deck 11; it had plenty of room and the outside deck (2 chairs+small table) was great.  The on-board activities were plentiful and the nightly entertainment shows were top-notch.  The staff from our cabin steward to the wait staff to the admin folks were great; friendly, personable, customer-focused.  The food in the two main restaurants (Versailles, Aqua) and the buffet/cafeteria (Market Cafe) were pretty bad!  We would put them on a par with airplane/hospital/school institutional type food.  We ate at 3 of the specialty (extra $'s!) restaurants; Cagney Steakhouse (great!); La Cucina Italian (very good); Ginza Chinese (just a notch about main free restuarants; not very good).  The destinations on this cruise were great; we enjoyed every single stop!

cruise was to short we loved every hour and every port ncl  was the best our cabin4501 was very  noise filled even in port we talked to the staff and they moved us to cabin9675 very nice and quiet the whole trip was wonderfull

Our family just spent 9 nights in the Baltic on the Norwegian Star on the 14 th floor in one of their 2 Villa's.  To say that we were treated like Royalty would still not do justice to the amazing cruise.  The 3 bedroom, 3 bath Villa with 2 (yes, that is correct) massive patio's totally almost 6,000 square feet (no I am not exaggerating!), a Grand Piano, private Jacuzzi is still underestimating the impact of walking into  your living room with gigantic floor to ceiling windows overlooking the pool area of the ship.  Our bathrooms, bedrooms, walk in closets all were large, luxurious and very hard to leave on our last day.  If anyone wants to experience how royalty travels, I recommend booking one of only 2 Villa's as soon as possible!  The experience will far exceed your wildest expectations!!

As always our cabin was nice with a good size balcony (7092) and the employees do make our stay the most pleasant. Always a smile. In terms of the cruise stops, there were ok and we did think that our stay in Iceland was not long enough (one full day and the next day we had to be on ship by 12:30pm), we could have used one more full day there. And we did hear several guests expressing the same sentiment.

This was a pleasant cruise to some destinations that I have always wanted to visit and St. Petersburg did not disappoint us!  That was clearly the highlight of the cruise but we also thoroughly enjoyed Stockholm and Berlin and Copenhagen and Oslo, in that order.   The disappointment with the cruise was the ship, the Royal Princess.  The food was mediocre, at best.  While the ship is almost brand new, the layout of the decks and dining rooms was poorly planned.  Promenade deck is ruined by the placement of the lifeboats.  There is no deck that you can walk around the entire ship without having to go inside to get around some obstructions.  There are no stairs in the center of the ship so you have to wait for a crowded elevator to go up or down a couple flights or go to either end of the ship to get to the stairs.  There are two dining rooms stuck midship so to get from one end of deck 5 or 6 you have to go up to 7 and then back down.  Also, the crew were not a happy lot and it was clear that they were unhappy that the crew overall had been cut back by ten percent and they were working harder than they should have.  Also, there were bugs on the outside decks that should have been cleaned up.  We have cruised on Cunard and Celebrity and, unfortunately, the Royal Princess just does not measure up, especially to the Celebrity Silhouette which we think is the best large ship out there at this time.

This was our first time on NCL, after 7 previous cruises on 6 other lines (we're not very loyal cruisers, are we?). The service on the Star was fine, but what really irked me was the mandatory $12/day/person gratuity charge. Where was the incentive for the service people, they'd get their gratuity no matter what?! I wish NCL would just build in that gratuity in the price, or better yet, pay their employees what they're worth to begin with. I was also a bit irked with the constant efforts to squeeze more money out of us - the obnoxious photo-taking (only $20 a picture!), the spa treatments, the shops, the specialty restaurants, etc.etc. I took note of a poster down on the 4th deck from which we always left the boat for shore. I don't think this poster was supposed to be seen by us passengers: it was a list of the 4 "tenets" of NCL and number one was, in essence, generate revenue; number 2 is the guests (passengers). Our comfort and experience rates below them making more money! OK, I get it, that's what they are all about, but please, don't make it so in-our-face with that poster!!

The food was fine, although we avoided the Market Place (buffet) for dinner; breakfast was chaotic enough with lots of people jostling, etc. I thought the food for breakfast was just fine, lots of fresh fruit including a favorite of mine, watermelon. I always had fruit and pastries/bread, so I can't comment on any of the other foods they offered, but they seemed to look fine. The coffee isn't very good but if you add milk and sugar it suffices. The coffee cups are pretty small, compared to what I'm used to so I had to make multiple trips to refill. We ate dinner at either the Versailles (nice, calm, quiet, but they ask for a slightly more "nice" dress style, which you can ignore, of course) or the Aqua rooms (same food, same good service, more casual dress expectations, but much louder room). We never ate at any of the specialty restaurants on principle - didn't want to give NCL more of our money just to eat when we could eat for "free" in the other places. The food was fine, not exceptional but good to eat, prepared nicely, served politely.

We didn't buy any of NCL's shore excursions with the exception of booking the Hop On Hop Off bus in Helsinki and Stockholm, so we'd be sure that bus would take us directly from and back to the ship. In Warnemunde (Germany) we had the most delightful day touring the area with Friends of Dave tours. He's an ex-pat, has lived there 15 years, very personable, fun, knowledgeable. The bus only holds 19 tourists and we didn't quite fill the bus so the group was a great size. Note: he doesn't always offer tours for every day a ship is in port. In St. Petersburg we had another very delightful tour with SPb Tours (they also do tours of some of the other port cities). Our guide was Tatiana and she showed us, however briefly due to the enormity of this town and our limited 2 days there, not only her city and it's treasures but also that Russians are people just like us. In the other ports, with "Top 10" guides in hand,  we winged it on our own and had a fine time. Here's another annoyance with NCL - the information about each port was scant on the daily sheets they put in our cabins. It would have been nice to have a map, local info etc. given to us each day as we've received on other cruise lines.

Overall, we did have a good trip, but may not choose NCL in the future.

This is a great cruise to discover the Scandinavian countries and an easy way to see St. Petersburg Russia. We have cruised a number of times and found this particular Norwegian ship and crew merely adequate. The food quality and availability was sub par and many of the crew seemed less than motivated. The itinerary seemed appropriate. The biggest question would be whether it is worth the effort and cost to go into Berlin, as it requires an almost 3 hour bus ride (probably less by train) each way and adds additional cost. We went with a Berlin tour operator not associated with the cruise line which cost far less than the NCL tour excursions and broke into much smaller groups in Berlin, making it easier to move about. We found Berlin was probably worth the effort as it has changed considerably since I was last there and offers many interesting sights. However, if you are on a tighter budget, you may want to forgo this excursion as other cities offer many of the same experiences.

I compare my Princess cruise (P)  experience (5) with NCL(2)

I likes the food better on the menu at P classic menu includes shrimp coctails and last night baked alaska

not seen at NCL.Also movies at the lage pool about 10 hrs/day.

The gym facilities are nicer on P.

For the most most other things are about equal which means very good.

The entertaintainment on NCL is a little better/

Itinanery was great. Buffet was terrible - no variety at all, there were no fruits, watermelon was half rotten. You had to fight for a table. Tables weren't clean. Utensils weren't readily available, had to run and look for them. To get food you had to wait in long lines.

There were 12 of us. To get into a restaurant for dinner, we had to wait in line. When we asked if we can reserve the table for 12, we were told that it's not possble. towards the end of the voyage, we were told that it was possible to reserve table for 12. looks like management either absent or does not care. Last year we went to Medetarenian on Holland America and there is no comparison at all

This was our forth such cuises and definitely the best.  Aside from friendliness of the staff and cleanliness of the room and the ship overall, officials were very helpfull in following up with our lost luggages which did not arrive from the airline.  Food selection was excellent and we particularly liked the open seating and not being assigned to a particular dinning room, table, and group of people.

We really enjoyed this wonderful trip on the Norwegian Star. Everything was great, starting from room, facilities, spa, dining and service. Definitely recommend this cruise.

This cruise was both good and bad.

The positives are the port itinerary it was absolutely phenomenal. So much to see but yet so little time. It was as if we were walking through history.

The evening entertainment shows were exceptional every night of the cruise. Be sure to catch Ian, the cruise director's magic show, he is a very accomplished magician.

The negatives. The lifeboat drill is a farce we never did know where our lifeboat would be in case of emergency. It was nothing like my previous five cruises.

In the Versailles  dining room at several times we had stained napkins, not very appealing. In our cabin our bathmat had a hole in about half of the cruise, again that did not leave a good impression.

In the café even though it was posted do not refill glasses or personal water bottles psgrs did it all the time it was a very unsanitary situation.

As for their shore excursions I only went on one invited personally booked most of my own. It was probably a good thing that I only did one. The tour operator gave us incorrect information about a shuttle bus and consequently we were stranded in town and had no ride back to the ship. A Cunard cruise ship representative was able to assist us to find a bus back to the ship. NCL refunded the cost of our bus ticket, but made no compensation for the 90 minutes we waited for a non-existent shuttle. I think they got off cheap since if we would have missed the ship they would have had to pay for transportation to our next port.

With the ships itinerary sunset arrives very late in the evening. April went out on deck to watch the sunset and afterwards many come indoors to look for something to eat ice cream or pizza or something. There is no food available at that time unless you go to the small Blue Lagoon restaurant. Again I don't feel this is very good planning.

Overall, this cruise is relaxing just like all the cruise I took before.  However, the food is not as great as others NCL I took before.  Service are OK, and crew member are friendly... at least, my teenage daughter had great time to chat with them.

Here is the horrible start begin... I studied before the trip and find the instruction from NCL website about travelling from airport to ship.  Apparently, the info is incorrect.  So, after 24 hours flight, we took the metro and s-tran... then got off the station which is not where the ship is.  We walked with luggages and find many people give many answers... but none point us to the ship.  We walked 1.5 hours, not 15 min, finally reach the port with near death experience.  What can I say... we made... but this is the unforgetable event in our vacation... FYI, when you get off the train, take bus 26, which will take you to the terminal... that saves 1.5 hours wondering in still-working ports.