Norwegian Breakaway 14-Day Cruise to Caribbean Departing New York January 2nd, 2017

January 16, 2017

To: Whom it may concern,

Regarding Norwegian Breakaway 14-Day Cruise to Caribbean Departing New York January 2nd, 2017,

After just returning from a 14-day Norwegian Caribbean Cruise with my family, we all feel the need to express in full the disappointment and total disregard of our needs, both special and ordinary, on your Cruise line. To understand our expectations here is some background on us. We started cruising in 2010 with Celebrity Cruises and had exceptional service and accommodations. We are a small family with special needs. My wife has been paraplegic for 25 years and she uses an electric wheelchair. We started cruising, bringing our college-aged daughter with us, because cruising allows my wife and family to enjoy the totality of a vacation while having all of our mobility needs met (both on the ship and on the ports of call). We truly enjoyed Celebrity Cruises and we rebooked several other cruises with them, each time  receiving the best service and entertainment. In 2013, we purchased a Royal Caribbean cruise for our extended family. Although the accommodations were slightly less impressive than Celebrity’s, we found that Royal provided us with the same level of service, mobility, and entertainment that we have come to expect. This year, we decided to book another cruise for January with myself, my wife, my daughter, and my parents. Norwegian was our choice, because it was the only cruise available that was leaving from the New York/ New Jersey area, and we could get an accessible balcony room (this is very important to my wife for reasons I will mention later). We purchased this cruise through the company , it was purchased over the phone. Two rooms were ordered upfront, one accessible balcony room for my wife and I, and one standard balcony room for my parents and daughter. A month before the departure date, my parents health suffered and we had to cancel their room reservation. On the phone speaking to a representative of , we cancelled the standard balcony room, but we were told that my daughter could not be added to our accessible balcony room as a third guest because of fire code issues. We accepted this with no question, and they offered us another balcony room, that could accommodate three guests and would be accessible. At this point, the representative from conference called a representative directly from Norwegian Cruise Lines to discuss the details of this room, and confirm the rebook. I explicitly asked the Norwegian and representatives if this new room would in fact be completely accessible to my wife’s wheelchair as she is confined to the wheelchair and cannot walk at all, would accommodate three guests, and would have a balcony. Both representatives confirmed that the room would be accessible; and they even went so far as to provide me with the width of the door opening in inches, which they claimed would be 27.5 inches. They assured me that if we could get through the door opening of 27.5 inches that we would have no problems accessing the bathroom, bed area, and balcony. I repeatedly asked them individually to confirm that the room would be accessible, the bathroom would be accessible and the balcony would be accessible. One of my parting comments was, “I don’t want to get on the boat and find out that the room is not accessible”. To this comment they responded with assurance that I would have , “No Issues”. Upon their confirmation, we accepted and confirmed the change of the room.

                We boarded the Norwegian Breakaway on January 2nd 2017, at approximately 12 noon. This time is very important to note because of my wife’s medical needs. We were assigned to room 9322 and my daughter went upstairs ahead of my wife and I to check out the room. She returned claiming that, “we are going to have a big problem”. From just looking at the door to the room, my daughter could tell that there was no way that my wife’s wheelchair was going to fit through the opening. My wife attempted to access the room at this point, and the opening was more than 4 inches too small. I then proceed to physically measure the door opening and it was nowhere near 27.5 inches. Further insult to injury came when we inspected the inside of our cabin. Firstly, the space to access the bed was not at all close to the area that my wife would need. Secondly, there was a step to the bathroom and balcony which was approximately 4-5 inches tall. Anyone would recognize that this is not accessible AT ALL. The bathroom was not wide enough for any chair, and the shower also had a step and  was not wide enough for ADA access. Basically there was not a single thing accessible to the cabin even if we could get through the door. This is in direct contradiction to everything that we were told by Norwegian representatives and by .

                My wife began to get very nervous at this point. We returned to Guest Services at around 12:15pm to 12:30pm and spoke with Guest Services personnel. After waiting in line, we explained the problems with our cabin and our previous correspondences with the Norwegian representative. She replied that she was sorry about the misinformation, and that the cruise was completely booked. We then asked what do we do, what happens if the boat leaves and we have no accessible room, and if we should get off the boat before it leaves (which we were told would depart at 3pm). The woman from Guest Services responded, “I don’t want to think about that scenario, and I will speak to my supervisor to try and find a room for you”. We were told to stay onboard and to return after 3pm. There was very little we could do in that time between, because my wife was starting to become sick from nerves, and our situation was nowhere close to being solved. We returned to Guest Services when requested to inquire on the progress. The Guest Services person said that they were still looking for a room, and at this point we asked to get the supervisor. We were introduced to Jellica, the Breakaway’s ADA coordinator, at this time. She was not informed about our situation previous to our meeting and I had to re-explain our problems. Her response was that she was going to look into changing our room, which required her to check all of the comparable accessible rooms, and we were never assured that the situation would be solved. She told us that it would take her hours to do this, and to return at 6pm. We returned to Guest Services at 6pm, met with Jellica again, and she informed us that she had not found any room for us. At this point I informed Jellica that we had a medical issue and that my wife had a need to catheterize herself. It had been 12 hours since we left our home, which is way too long for a person to go without performing a self-catheterization, we expected to have a room in which she could do this, but we had nothing. Jellica told us that she needed more time and to return after 7pm, she also mentioned again that she was doing her best but there was no guarantee of her finding a room.  My wife after hearing this news was in pain and in tears. My daughter took her down to the Medical area on Deck 5 so that she could get on a bed to self-catheterize.

                Medical was not officially opened at this time, but since it was a true emergency, my daughter banged on the door and the desk attendant opened for them. The desk attendant did not understand the severity of the situation after being explained, and my wife and daughter requested that a doctor come right away because we did not need a service, we only needed a bed to lay on for self-cath. The desk attendant asked for our keycard and then got a doctor. The doctor, who should know the severity of the situation, took several minutes of explanation and convincing to allow them into a room. She was not helpful and slightly rude. My wife finally got into a room with a hospital bed to discover that the traumatic experiences of the day had affected her entire system and she was able to self-catheterize, but also had to take care of her hygiene since she had an accident from the extended time and nervousness. My daughter was waiting in the hallway while my wife was taking care of herself for a period of approximately 20 minutes. While in the hallway the doctor and desk attendant approached her multiple times, with a rude attitude, to ask, “is she done yet?” and “when will she be done?”. There was no sympathy, or no attempt to make sure that my wife was okay. The desk attendant even opened the door to the room without knocking to tell my wife that they were going to have a meeting with the medical staff and that she could not be in the room much longer. My wife finished in medical and rejoined me upstairs at Guest Services to await Jellica’s response at 7pm.

                At 7pm Jellica said that she could not find any balcony rooms that were accessible, to which we all responded simultaneously that we would take ANY ROOM that was accessible at this point, which we had mentioned before. She also mentioned that she could not refund our money for the difference from balcony to standard room, even though we never asked her for a refund, we only asked her to find us a room. She again told us to return after 8pm with no guarantees. Finally, at 8pm Jellica mentioned that she found a couple that was using an ADA accessible room that had no disability needs for the room. She had offered them an upgrade from their standard Forward cabin 9700 to our inaccessible balcony cabin 9322. They accepted the upgrade, and we had no choice but to accept the downgrade. We arrived into our new cabin 9700 after 8pm. My wife remained ill for that night and the following day, directly because of the traumatic events of that day. No one should have to go through the medical and emotional stress that my wife had to endure because of Norwegian Cruise Lines and ’s complete incompetence of the needs of mobility impaired guests and the complete lack of accommodating customer service. No one assured us at any point that they would be able to fix our problems or make us happy again. Instead each person passed the buck onto another person, compounding the stress we had to face. From being in the service industry for more than three decades, the first thing that I would expect was friendly service, and offers for compensation. This never occurred throughout the entire day. I wish that this was the only terrible experience that we had, and I wish that I could say that the Cruise got easier from that point on, but unfortunately this was only the beginning of a 14 day nightmare. Everything from service to basic information and basic courtesy was wrong, incorrect, and incompetent to our needs. I will begin to highlight the moments and actors during our Cruise that best demonstrate the hardships that we had to face on our vacation, which we have NEVER had to face with other cruise lines.

Jellica – ADA Coordinator

                I could probably write multiple letters about how unqualified and incompetent Jellica was as an ADA Coordinator, and management. I will refrain from doing so for this letter. All that is needed to know are the facts. When asked about finding a chair for reclining in the sun for my wife, because we no longer had a balcony room, Jellica simply responded that there were no chairs that would be available for my wife to slide into. This was completely incorrect. Within a day my daughter and I found multiple options across the boat. If she wanted to accommodate she would have looked herself or reserved something for us. She had no clue what a beach wheelchair was. When asked about Shore Excursions (see next paragraph) she was completely incorrect and unhelpful. She offered many times to escort us to shows where she would put my wife behind poles, behind large speakers, and in the way of the performers. We eventually stopped asking for her “help” all together. In short, she knows NOTHING about ADA, NOTHING about mobility and accessibility, and frankly she knows NOTHING about the ship. The fact that Norwegian Cruise lines has placed her at a management position is both mind boggling, and embarrassing to the company. Jellica needs to be trained top to bottom if you expect her to do the job that she is hired to do. I will say that she made an attempt to be friendly at every encounter, but her lack of knowledge made this friendliness seem fake and insincere.

Shore Excursions

                One of the things my family enjoys most about cruises are the options of accessible Shore Excursions. In the past we have visited many islands and have had fantastic accessible tours. We logged into the Norwegian website before getting on the Breakaway and saw basically no options for accessible tours there, but we are used to having to inquire about special tours and we were fairly confident that when on board the Shore Excursions staff would have alternative or scheduled accessible tours not advertised on the website. My wife went to the Shore Excursions desk on multiple occasions to ask about available accessible tours. Each time, the person behind the desk would literally pick up the paper that listed the excursions and read off the names of the tours, only to tell us that there was nothing available. We believed that this was not the case and was not satisfactory because we could read those papers ourselves, and could not believe that there were no options. We asked for Jellica’s help in finding the proper excursion for us. She returned the same answer that there was nothing available. We then asked if we could arrange a private transportation on an island we wanted to see more of. Jellica talked with the Shore Excursion’s manager, who she never gave us a contact for to speak with, and they did find a private accessible van that we could rent, but we would need to use a push chair and the cost was very excessive for little return. We got off the boat in Barbados and my wife went up to a Norwegian Tour person at the port. His name was Jerwyn. She asked if there was any accessible tour available for the island, to which he instantly replied that there “certainly was a tour, but it was required to book in advance”. This response was directly the opposite of what we were told on the ship. That night, we called up Jellica again and told her what Jerwyn said to us. Jellica responded that she actually knows Jerwyn and that she would ask him if there was anything available for the next and last port of call St. Kitts. Later that night Jellica said that unfortunately there was no tours available and that we would have had to book it the first day we got on the ship. We were disappointed, but we still got off the ship at St. Kitts to make the best of the day. My daughter saw Jerwyn on the dock and asked him if there were any available tours. He said that there were not, but based on the amount of misinformation and miscommunication my daughter was very angry and decided to ask a Celebrity Cruise shore excursion person that she also saw on the dock. She explained to the Celebrity Cruise member that we have cruised on Celebrity many times and have booked accessible tours with them. She asked if she could pay them directly to take one of their many accommodating tours. The Celebrity Cruise member asked if we were on the Norwegian ship, my daughter replied, yes, and the Celebrity Cruise member went to the manager of “Khathom” (not sure on spelling) Tours on St.Kitts and asked directly if there were any Norwegian Shore Excursions that were accessible. I want to reiterate that a Celebrity Cruise employee went to the manager of the St. Kitts tours to ask if there was a Norwegian excursion that would accommodate us. That is excellent service provided by another Cruise line for your cruise. The manager of the St. Kitts tours found us a tour that was PERFECT for us and it was booked and accomplished in less that five minutes. The manager of the St. Kitts tours brought over the manager of Norwegian’s shore excursions, I cannot remember her name but I know that she was from Romania. This manager proceeded to take our room number to charge us for the tour and get us a ticket. We asked her directly, how could this be that a Celebrity cruise employee was able to get us a Norwegian Excursion in less than five minutes when we had been asking on the ship for more than a week. Her response was completely unsatisfactory, she blamed other employees rather than herself, and she also mentioned that she was approached directly by someone (I am assuming it was Jellica) to set up a private van for us on one of the islands. What this proves is that she was aware that we were having difficulty securing an excursion and she never made any attempts to help us or accommodate us in any way. She also mentioned that several tours we COULD HAVE gone on needed to be booked the first day of our cruise (which we spent trying to get a room) and that they cancelled tours that we would have been happy to be on which had only a few people sign up for. You lost money from not only us, but also from the other guests that you disappointed by cancelling their excursions. More importantly than losing our money you lost the confidence and satisfaction from multiple guests because of your staff’s incompetence. The tour we took was lovely and I wish that we could have gone on more excursions.

Hallway Carts and Attendants

                I will say that the cleanliness and cabin cleaning service was very good on Norwegian, however the stateroom attendants have serious issues with their cleaning carts in the hallways. For the first half of the cruise, everytime we attempted to get to our accessible room all the way down the hallway of Deck 9, three stateroom attendants would leave 5-8 carts unattended in the hallways. Many of the carts were broken and every trip turned into an obstacle where myself and my daughter had to move carts just so that my wife could make it down the hall. My wife could never get to the room unaccompanied because no stateroom attendant would be around to help her move their carts. One evening in particular there were eight large carts, dishes on the floor, and multiple laundry bags in our way. We began the now normalized action of picking up the dishes, putting them in the cart, and moving the carts one by one on our own so that my wife could get by. After we moved about two carts worth of obstacles, a stateroom attendant finally noticed. Instead of jumping to action to move the carts he exclaimed to us that we needed to “Call out for someone to move the carts”. He was angered that we had put some of the plates from on the ground on top of one of his carts. At this point I was furious, and told them that I would not move another cart again, this was after days of stateroom attendants idly standing by and watching my daughter and I move their carts for them, while they offered little-to-no assistance. After this episode, the stateroom attendant significantly lowered the amount of carts that were left in the hallways and became much more vigilant to help us. This should be addressed in the training of stateroom attendants because I am positive that we were not the only people affected by this on the Breakaway. In addition, there was a guest on our floor that would leave a motorized scooter in the middle of the hallway. Not only is this a means of egress hazard, Norwegian staff never resolved this after seeing us have to backtracked around the entire boat to avoid the scooter, and in some occasions having to flag down other passengers to help us lift the scooter up and move it somewhere that we could get by. Passengers should not have to solve these problems as we had to leave a note on the guest’s scooter, Cruise staff should proactively know that it was a risk to everyone and an inconvenience. This also needs to be addressed by Norwegian training.

Service and Hospitality

                Again, I could probably write ceaselessly about the lack of quality in service and hospitality. I will only highlight some of the misery that my family incurred because of your staff. There was no attempt by almost every employee we engaged with to be accommodating. We felt unwanted everywhere we went with very few exceptions (Dino from Bosnia in the Casino, Jose from India in the Taste/Savor Restaurant, the Assistant Captain, and a scattering of a few others on board). What was clear to my family and from our many years of experience in the Service industry was that no one was held accountable for their actions by upper management, and that there was a complete lack of training. For example, we waited for over an hour for service in practically empty Specialty restaurants, we were told to get things ourselves from Waiters that were serving us at tables, Waiters when asked about dishes would pick up menus and read verbatim the description on the menu, managers in the theatre completely ignored the needs of mobility impaired people (refusing to get chairs for the elderly and turning them away). This is a huge problem, I cannot stress it enough. Your staff made us miserable more times than they made us joyful. The only way we made this Cruise into a vacation was by making excuses for poor service, coming to the conclusion that we cannot blame the workers for their lack of supervision and training. I can only blame corporate and lack of proper management for this failure.

In conclusion, the difference between our experience with Norwegian and other cruise lines was clear. We received virtually no service, and worse yet an unforgettable and terrible experience was dealt to a person who deserves to have rest and enjoyment, my wife, who deals with challenges every day. We look forward to hearing your response to our experience, and we hope that no one will have to deal with the complete and utter failures that you have delivered to my family, especially mobility challenged guests who seek out cruises as a priority option for vacationing.