Think before booking

Sorry to read that you felt cheated on your cruise.  Prices as you have discovered vary widely.  All of the above advice is excellent.  Loyalty may not matter anymore but you can always book on another cruiseline.  Your choices are many.  Just remember if you want to take advantage of price drops, your choice of cabins will be more restricted.  Also, you may not get your dining time preference.

NCL does not care about LOYALTY just ask Roxanne from customer service. Seven times with NCL , twice this year 10 weeks apart.. GEM and DAWN. Missed out on AARP on board credit .. denied ... 10 days .. beverage package denied.. at 38 bucks a bucket of beer.. worth fighting for.. bottom line .. my travel agent has already lost commission on our Vegas trip. and my new agent is figuring out my best value for my next cruise , Vegas and Florida , Hey NCL money talks we are done with you,

Thank you all for some sound advice... I am looking to spend my vacation money elsewhere .. frankly NCL has disappointed us .. even our agent sympathizes..I am tired of the false sales pitch.. my money will speak elsewhere  

Loyalty means nothing to NCL just ask Roxanne " Whats loyalty got to do with it. Cruise ship agents and Travel Agent " business can do whatever it takes to make a customer happy. been there done that, I WILL LISTEN TO NO ARGUMENT, NORWEGIAN  CRUISE LINES ARE NOT LOYAL TO SEVEN TIMES CUSTOMERS

Prices go up and down depending on how the ship is booking.  If you were happy with the price when you booked it,  don't talk prices with others if it will ruin your vacation.  you will always find someone that got a better deal then you did.

Book a trip when you think it is a good price,  go on your cruise and have a good time.

And another tool to use is Price Alerts. When we were booked on our Trans-Atlantic on the Caribbean Princess, I had the Price Alerts set up from Cruiseline.com and would get an email anytime the price changed. One day, I received an email showing the price of a Balcony cabin was reduced by 49% since we had booked many months earlier (and was actually less than the obstructed oceanview we had originally booked). I called my agent and he in turn contacted Princess. Princess was nice enough to upgrade us to a Balcony under the new promo although was lost our 2 specialty dining offer we had under the original promo. That was fine for us since we would have rather had a balcony for our 14 day cruise and specialty restaurants onboard aren't all that expensive.

Thank you for posting your review.

One suggestion to consider is to utilize the services of a good TP. Ours keeps on top of the various special deals and moves our bookings over when more favorable offers are published. She saved us over $1200 and got us better OBCs on our upcoming winter trips as a result. 

I agree that there can be huge differences in prices and percs. We booked our upcoming cruise over a year in advance. Over the next 6 months until it sold out I watched the price jump by 50% for the same balcony. They recently listed a few openings on this cruise and the room prices are still 50% higher for an inferior balcony. Over the course of the year I have seen many promotional offers. Some looked good some looked mediocre. That is the industry and how it rolls. The one thing I have seen is that for best pricing you either book a year out or wait and hope to get a good last minute deal but even those appear to be getting less.

Please keep in mind that cruise lines offer different "Specials" during the booking time for any given cruise. For instance, one of the other passengers may have booked the cruise before you or after you when the cruise line was offering a different promotion than what you may have gotten for the same cruise. Although for most lines, these promotions are "For New Bookings Only" for the time the special is running. Some lines "may" be able to change the promotion but when you gain some of the new offerings under the different promotion, you may also lose some of the offerings afforded on the promotion you are giving up (ie. you may have received a free specialty dinner onboard with the original promo but with the one you are changing to, you may lose it  but will be gaining something else with the new promo). These promos can be things like upgrades, OBC's, speciality dining or even a free excursion. This happened to us on our Princess sailing this last April. I lost 2 specialty dinners by changing the promo to a newer one but was upgraded from an Obstructed Oceanview to a Balcony for no additional cost when Princess was running a promo different than the one they had when we booked months earlier. All in all, it depends on the promotion running at the time of your booking.