If you are thinking of booking a cruise with NCL then just don’t, at least not before reading about the very poor recent cruise experienced and confirmed by speaking to over 100 people during the cruise
This issues started about 4 weeks before departure. A quick email from the travel company, Cruise Nation in this case, ( who equally gave a very poor experience in so many ways), to say there had been a minor change to the itinerary but no details. After ringing them up, once again, a subsequent email arrived showing the first and last ports, Dominican Republic and Cozumel had been removed from the itinerary but no explanation. Hardly a minor change dropping almost a third of the stops including ones I particularly wanted to go to and the reason for choosing this cruise in the first place. I would never have booked a 14 day cruise with only 5 stops originally as all these days at sea are so boring. I rang up NCL in the UK to be told it was due to maintenance issues with the ship. More on that later. Now according to NCL’s own terms and conditions if they make any major changes, and this this must surely count as one, they are supposed to write to you, and if you are not happy, offer you the option of an alternative holiday or a full refund. This should also apply through official travel agents they trade through, they can’t just wash their hands of the issue. But no I had no offers of either from either NCL or Cruise Nation. If you agreed to purchase a car with certain named options for a fixed price and it turned up with features missing you would obviously be within your rights to reject the car and expect a full refund. The same should surely apply here as you are not getting what you originally agreed to. All NCL offered was a pitiful refund of $300 in total per couple, but actually $100 of this would have been given anyway due to $50 per port shore excursion credit. So only $200 to miss out on 2 ports. PATHETIC
Once onboard, we discovered the inside cabin was the smallest we had ever seen. Nowhere to sit apart from the bed, and so little storage space that some items had to remain in the suitcases to be brought out when needed.
Due to the huge amount of at sea time it was necessary to purchase to Wifi package for something to pass the time. What a RIP OFF price. Almost £500 for 2 weeks for 2 people. That would get me over 18 months of broadband at home.
After a crew member asked how things were going, I replied that they would have been a lot better if we weren’t spending the first 5 days at sea, due to so called maintenance issues causing the ship to sail at a slower speed. He categorically denied there was any issue with the ship. So I headed to Guest Services to try and get to the bottom of things. But they were very evasive and would not give me a straight answer. One lady there said they had not been told the exact reason and only given a generic answer to give to passengers. When pressed she said there could be 3 possible reasons
Weather, which can be immediately ruled out as a reason as the changes were made a month before sailing
Fuel saving
Maintenance issues with the ship
She said I would need to contact NCL on my return for further information. So if it was fuel saving that would be disgusting ruining peoples trip to save money. If there was a maintenance issue maybe the trip should not have run in the first place. Another passenger told me that he had been told that one of the engines was out. If so this seems very dangerous to choose to travel all this distance and put passengers at risk of being stranded if further problems occurred. I still want an answer as to why our trip was ruined before starting by the itinerary change which so many onboard complained about.
I had read various reviews before going on the cruise of how poor the dining experience had now become in the main dining rooms on NCL’s ships these days, they weren’t wrong. They have 3 main complementary dining rooms all serving the same menu. This was as in the past, however previously there was far more variation day to day. Not any more. The menu is in 2 list parts. The left hand one contains starters and what they call ‘classic’ mains. The 6 or so classics never changed day to day. The only changes were to a few of the starters day to day. So after a few days when you had tried what you liked you came bored of the left hand list. The right hand list consisted of 6 or so ‘featured’ mains and wine recommendations. So on days when you didn’t fancy any of the few alternatives you were forced to eat either pub style meals from O’Sheehan’s bar, or the garden buffet. Not that you expect from an expensive cruise experience. One day they ran out of Prosecco and the alternative supplied were warm as was the beer and were undrinkable. Thank goodness we had 2 days speciality meals as part of the package which we took in Cagney’s Steakhouse which was excellent, but expensive at $150 for a couple of meals if you had to pay for them, only including a glass of Prosecco and a beer. Seems like NCL are downgrading their complementary meals in the hope that people will end up getting fed up with the options and spend big at the various speciality restaurants.
When you want to find somewhere to sit in quiet to relax indoors if you can’t find a seat outside, that is almost impossible. Everywhere is noise with no reasonable sized library where you can sit in peace, unlike other ships. We found one of the only places was the chairs outside Cagneys during the daytime, and were not the only ones sitting there.
The entertainment was very poor in quantity and quality. On previous cruises on the Sun and Spirit there were different main shows in the theatre each evening. However here there was only 2 main shows during the whole of the cruise. Burn the floor was excellent. However Six was appalling. From only 20 minutes in groups of people started to get up and leave and this continued through the show. Never seen this happen to a show before. The only reason we did not leave was that my partner is not very good on stairs and in the darkness made it even more difficult. So we had to sit and have our ears assaulted for an hour with loud, distorted noise where only one song had any sort of tune to it. I was amused to hear that a repeat of the performances a couple of days later had been cancelled due to ‘unforeseen circumstances’. At least it saved many others suffering what happened when we went.
Shore excursions. Here NCL not only ripped you off big time, but in one case using a right bunch of cowboy operators actually potentially put passengers lives at risk. In Aruba, the driver was so incompetent he couldn’t deal with counting up tickets correctly that the tour started 20 minutes late. He then added a visit to a pile of boulders to try and make up, doh, so that the visit to the Aloe Vera factory had to be cut short, and only just made it back to the ship on time with no time for shopping, as expected from advertised finishing time.
In Panama, a train trip alongside the canal was priced at an average price of $250 each. 6 coaches went, contains about 300 passengers. So NCL took over $70,000 that day just on that one excursion. The cost of theft coaches and drivers would easily been less than $1000 each and along with a few $ thousand for the train itself, the only other thing was a visit to one of the locks, which normal non group rates were only $20. So NCL made 10’s of thousands of dollars just from that one trip by ripping off passengers. However that was not the worst part. Finally the trip in Puerto Limon where the actions of the cowboy operators actually put people’s lives at risk and for which many complaints have gone in. Part way through the journey the driver exited from a T junction onto a dual carriageway. However he wanted to turn left while the traffic was heading right. So he turned the bus left and reversed back up the road with the front of the bus facing the oncoming traffic for maybe 500 m until there was a gap in the barrier where he could swap to the other side of the road and head in the direction he wanted. It all seemed highly illegal and dangerous. However this was nothing. Later in the journey whilst on another dual carriageway he came upon a traffic jam. Quite why as he seemed to have a sat nav on board. His solution, to reverse backwards against the traffic for about a mile into oncoming traffic. This involved weaving in and out of articulated trucks parked at the side of the road into traffic coming up to the bus. I have video evidence of this dangerous manoeuvre on my phone along with co-ordinates of where it happened due to data logging of locations on my phone. People on the bus were scared expecting a collision at the rear at any moment. People at the back were standing up bracing themselves for a collision. I’m sure none of this was legal and if he had done it in the UK would have lost his license and probably got a custodial sentence as well. When he eventually found a side road he headed down a side road for the next part of the trio, a boat ride. Here due to running late the trip was rushed. The driver pointed about animals at the side but not stop still long enough for people to take photos and there were lots of shouts of complaints from frustrated passengers. Then having turned around to return to the start as we were passing another boat travelling in the opposite direction he revved the engine so much that the back of our boat swung around and hit the passing boat near the front. A women behind me shouted out that she nearly had her arm taken off in the collision. Many of us put in complaints to shore excursions on our return about the dangerous experiences encountered. I believe there is an official complaint number that NCL have allocated internally about this but they would not divulge it. We were only offered a 25% take it or leave it option for the risks we had to endure. We all took it but said we would raise further complaints with NCL on our return as we were not satisfied this was sufficient. One person said he had heard that the lady who almost had her arm crushed had been given a full refund but shore excursions denied this.
So it is a catalogue of rip off pricing everywhere along with using cowboy operators who no doubt do the job on the cheap but put peoples lives at risk.
The final issue was we put in a bag of washing and despite NCL tagging the items on receipt they managed to mix up one item with another passenger. I had to personally return one item to another passenger given to us in error, and had to get the room steward to track down my partners missing top from the laundry.
So to sum up the experience everything is now so ridiculously overpriced. NCL seem happy to fleece existing customers to make up for loses they have encountered during covid rather than trying to encourage new customers. Recent reviews of cruise companies are now saying that NCL are now charging gratuities on the daily claimed value of Free at sea item drinks package, a daily charge of $20 and also on the perceived value of the speciality meal option from Free at sea package. This didn’t happen on my trip, but It was booked almost a year ago and things may have changed since.
If so this is yet another blatant rip off and totally against the perception of Free at sea which has already been paid for. I noticed this cruise that so many people like us were removing the rip off gratuities, which despite what people might think are not compulsory, only optional, from their daily charges so that they can pay people individually rather than line NCL’s pockets further. I spoke to many many people during the trip. Not a SINGLE ONE had praise for the trip. Many said after many years of using NCL that this would be the last time.
