The cruise experience was fair but not what I expected of Norwegian. I have cruised with five other cruise lines and would take four of them over Norwegian. I also did not like my booking experience through BJ's. My agent never responded to emails or replied to questions left to her voice mails. She wasn't even aware that BJ's offered their own excursions!
Embarkation
2 out of 5
Fiasco, misdirected luggage drop off, misdirected parking directions, stood in line over 1 1/2 hours with no access to restrooms just to get to the security check in! No welcome aboard party or refreshments.
Ship experiences
Food and Dining
2 out of 5
The two main ding rooms were nice and appealing and free style dining is nice except when it's not. No one told either my wife or I or another couple we dined with that we had to reserve Thanksgiving meal requiring us to hold a pager for forty minutes before being seated to turkey dinner. Neither the Venetian or Aqua dining rooms varied their menus very much and this was the first cruise (of many we have taken) where the cruise line didn't offer a lobster night (disappointing)! We were offered two specialty dinners with our balcony booking which lobster was offered as an add on for $25 per person (gratuities are extra even though we had prepaid gratuities). The Garden Bar open buffet was the most pleasant experience with plenty of variety of excellent food and available most times of the day.
Onboard Activities
3 out of 5
These amenities were adequate and appealing.
Entertainment
4 out of 5
The shows were good and some of the musicians were excellent.
Children's Programs
Didn't travel with chidren.
Service and Staff
4 out of 5
All of the staff were pleasant and helpful and our room steward was excellent.
Ship Quality
4 out of 5
It would have been nice to have a paper map of the ship with specific amenities of each deck listed until you get acquainted with the ship. Complaints: there are no trash cans available unless you are in an eating or snack area and the ships speaker system is extremely poor with no speaker in the cabin so you can't hear any of the annoucements!
Cabin / Stateroom
4 out of 5
Our balcony room was clean and adequate but had no coffee pot as described (had to be requested). It only had one outlet in the cabin which required bringing a multi plug with an extension cord for my bi-papp machine. We also had no air conditioning in the room two days after returning from excursions requiring us to prop our door open to get some cooling air from the ship's hallway!
Ship tip
Book your excursions through Norwegian because there is no one at your ports of call to direct you where to go to get your BJ's booked excursions and the paper instructions aren't adequate!
We enjoyed the Gumbalimba Park & Island tour. Interacting with the wild monkeys and posing with them and the parrots was fun. Also touring the chocolate and rum cake factories was interesting.
This is a Norwegian owned private island and it is the first cruise line island that required the quests to purchase all food available on the island! The ship didn't have adequate beach towels available for the passengers leaving the ship to spend the day on the island requiring quests to wait for additional towels to be delivered to the dock.
As bad as the embarkation experience! We were told to wait until our color coded luggage color was called before getting in line to leave. After two hours of waiting and the couple we traveled with (Canadian citizens) getting off an hour earlier, we got in a line that wrapped around the entire deck of the ship just to reach the immigrations check point.
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