Norwegian Dawn Cruise Reviews - Reviews

This was my 15th cruise and I'm sad to say it was the worst cruise I have ever experienced.  To start we were celebrating our 25th Anniversary and had booked a specialty restaurant for 6 with my children.  They were unable to accommodate our party of 6 at the same table at the hibachi grill. So we sat separately.  The first visit to the main dining for supper, after 1hour and 45 mins we still had not received the dessert menus or the second cup of coffee that I ordered with Baileys.  Received the Baileys but no coffee.  The second visit to the dinning room it was 1 hour 30 mins before we received the main course and that was only after my husband complained to the maître D. Staff was unorgainized and rude.  Needless to say we will NEVER cruise NCL again.

Ship was amazingly clean!  Staff were very attentive.  Food was excellent.  All types of entertainment on board from magic shows to comedy.  There was something for everyone.

Over all this cruise is really worth the money. It is a very low cost cruise & you get a lot for what you pay. We have cruised on Royal Caribbean & on Princess before & the cost was a lot higher but they did have larger boats with more stuff to do.

If you have kids there is a kids area with entertainment & activities. They do have set hours, the kids are grouped according to age (i.e. ages 6-9 were in our daughters group) and our daughter (8) had a good time meeting new kids. They do not take children under 3 without an adult.

There is a very small pool called Oasis on the front of the ship with for hot tubs (one on each corner). But believe me, the pool is very small compared to what we've experienced before. They also have a kids splash zone with little slides and several small pools plus a hot tub at the back of the ship. There is also a small arcade.

The restaurants are all pretty good, the Garden Café is open most often & has decent buffet style food. Large selection & cafeteria style seating. The cool part was you don't have to go at a set time. We also tried Bamboo restaurant (Asian) & loved the sushi, they also offer the usual dishes like fried rice, dumplings, spring rolls, general tso's, etc. You will need a reservation for this restaurant even though it's complimentary since it's very popular. Our favorite restaurant would be the Venetian steakhouse. Amazing food, also complimentary, but they are only open certain hours.

Other than that there is a small casino on board, bingo, different tournament's such as slot tourny's & claw machine tourny's, etc. They also have a Not so Newlywed show that is pretty cute.

I would recommend this as a low budget family vacation & there are the land excursions to do as well. We did the Dolphin excursion in Cozumel & it was great. We did not buy it thru the ship instead we waited until we walked off the boat & bought the package from el dorado tours (trust me you will see a lot of tourism agents holding signs). We did manage to get all 4 of us the dolphin excursion for $295 drinks, transportation, and food included. Also, when we arrived there (5 minutes from the boat) and finished our excursion our guide took us over to play with a manatee as well. That was pretty awesome! All in all great trip!

 The best part was riding motorcycles through the hills and mountains of one of the islands. I highly recommend it. Snorkeling was amazing. The hot tubs on the ship were horrible. They were either boiling hot or tepid. If you are looking forward to the hot tub for body aches as I was to you need to splurge on the extra payment for the Spa hot tub area. Definitely will do a cruise again.

NCL does a great job when it comes to their entertainment. The special entertainment is always good and the regular on ship entertainment does a very good job. We had a very nice mini suite for this cruise. Very comfortable. I wish they had more free movies in the rooms. Have basically a free on demand system like we have experienced on Celebrity. We enjoy renting in the room and watching a movie some times. Movie and general TV selections in the room are very limited. Our room steward was GREAT! What a very efficient and all around great guy. We enjoyed the large main dining room for breakfast. The Agua Dining room for some dinners and the 24 hour McSheenans pub themed sit down café for breakfast and lunch. We ate at this pub for all our lunches. We loved this place. Our three up charged package for fancy dining room experiences was  Great in the new Mexican Restaurant. Good dinner, great service and Fantastic Spicy Margaritas! Teppanyaki dinner was almost terrible. Our show was fine.  Very short, but OK. Very loud space! Could not hear anything but the large family of children screaming behind us. Food was extremely over salted and thus terrible. I ate it as I was hungry, but my gut, mouth and lips hated me for two days afterwards. The extreme salt literally burned my mouth and lips!  It was a total waist of our 2nd fancy dinner. Bummer. Final fancy dinner was the steak house. We should have known there was a problem with the very slow disorganized service to even get our order. The two couples next to us at the next table got up and had a total loud melt down about how bad the service was. Very upsetting to us as we were sitting there trying to enjoy our long wait for our food. The waiter we had seem to be having a personal melt down the whole evening. She would disappear for long periods of time. Other waiters were come over and apologize and try and get our meal going forward again. The food was clearly not freshly prepared for us and we ended up taking our dessert to go as we just did not want to sit there any longer and watch the continued melt down going on around us. It was not a good experience. A major bummer as we have eaten at the steak house several times on past cruises with NCL and had wonderful experiences. For the first time on NLC, the Aqua dining room had the fantastic food and service! Why upgrade to the fancy dining rooms? Not worth it this cruise. That is for sure! Only the Mexican Restaurant was a great experience. Over all, the crew were great. NCL does a goo basic job for the price you pay! They are a great less expensive cruise line. I feel the main dining rooms are getting better and better and the new addition of more included dining in other restaurants is great. The fancy dining is going downhill and not work the money when it comes to our experiences. Entertainment always the highlight of the cruise!

The ship has been in referb since our last cruise in Dec 2015. The upgrades were wonderful. Light and open feeling in all the public area.  Food was better than before, we really enjoyed the prime rib, fish and desserts. A little to much European flavor for me but there was always plenty of good food anyway. Getting on and off the ship was a breeze, no delays at all. The staff was wonderful and always available, especially the Hotel Manager and Cruise Director.  Entertainment was top shelf and plenty of variety.

Myself and my wife went on this cruise as a 36th wedding anniversary trip.  It was a special trip in all ways.  I am a big fan of the Freestyle venue.  We are not what you would call upscale by no means.  We do not enjoy the dress up and go to dinner aspects of fine dining.  This cruise fit us like a glove.  Dining options were fantastic especially the Specialty Dining Restaurants.  Very good food.  There were plenty of things to do on the ship to keep you busy while cruising and the crew took an interest in your well being.  I have to give a big shout out for our cabin steward.  It was like having a personal friend taking care of us.  A real credit to the Norwegian brand.  After all, your only as good as the people you employ.  The ports we visited were great as well.  I have to say my favorites were Costa Maya and Roatan.  I prefer the smaller crowds and the more quaint atmosphere.  If I were to mention areas I would like to see improvement or change.  The smoking policy.  I do not smoke cigarettes or cigars but I do vape.  I gave up tobacco 4 years prior.  I did however, have to set with all the tobacco smokers to enjoy my favorite vape.  This made me physically ill after a couple of days.  Please understand.  Cigarette smoke is nothing like vaping.  Vaping does not smell unpleasant and your clothes don't wreak afterwards.  My only other issue would be tendering at certain ports.  If you are not on a Norwegian excursion you have to wait until all the sponsored excursion passengers have tendered before you can get off the ship.  This made us 1 1/2 hours late for one of our excursions.  I have learned from this.  Norwegian need to explain this up front and announce the tendering ports prior to the cruise.  All in all we had a great time and would do it again.  We did not take advantage of the cruise next option but are already looking into our next adventure.  Thanks for a great time Norwegian.

Considering I had sailed on Norwegian Dawn a couple of years back I think it has gone downhill. I found the food in the restaurants to be quite disappointing, The buffet wasabi improvement. Iordered veal Oscar in the dining room, by the way both included restauransn have the same menu, was more like dog meat Oscar, mushy and no likeness to veal. As the week progressed and I tried of the entrees they only got worse. The safest thing to eat was the steak on the menu. I refuse to pay $30 up charge for a specialty restaurant with an added 18% service charge when I'm already being charged a service charge for the freestyle restaurants. We did try the Chinese restaurant which was included in the package and that was no better. And average cocktail was $15 with 18% service charge. The entertainment wash boring and the comedians were far from funny. Considering I have traveled on Princess and Celebrity in the past I think I will stick with Celebrity since it's only a couple of hundred dollars. In the long run you get more for your money and it is like night and day. Dinner dress was supposed to be business dress but they allowed people in wearing anything from shorts, t shirts, etc. Even didn't comment when one young woman say at the table next to us crossed legged!  Far from classy, we dressed as we would when dining at a nice restaurant at home.

Loved this cruise ... worth every penny.  The staff was exceptional.  My only complaints:

1.  my stateroom had some kind of "leak", and the room had an unpleasant odor for the last week of the cruise.

2.  Within the first week the ship ran out of Pinot Grigio.

We sailed in late October on the newly refurbished Norwegian Dawn. The ship is very beautiful in all areas except for the absolutely hideous artwork in the Venetian main dining room. The paintings look like members of a rival cruise line snuck on board and defaced the original art the night before she was to be released out of dry dock and put back into service, before the artwork could be replaced.....Seriously, you would have to book a cruise on the Dawn to see that I am not exaggerating.

 That aside, We had a wonderful time and the cruise itself was a great value and the ship had an above average itinerary. We got in Boston and had no problems. It went fast and smooth.

We were at sea for the first 4 days and had some rough seas in the North Atlantic for a couple of days, but that is to be expected for that time of year.

Our first stop was San Juan and we have been there before. The ships dock close to downtown in old San Juan and you can take a free trolley to see all of the sites near the ship. You can hop on and off anytime and it costs nothing. We went to the Fort and the Castle and then into Old San Juan for some shopping. 

We then stopped at 3 of the best islands to see in the Southern Caribbean. They were Aruba, Curacao, and Bonaire. They are all 3 owned by the Netherlands and they are all very clean safe ports to visit.

 We then sailed to Ocho Rios, Jamaica, where we went for a day at the beach and had a great time, followed by Grand Cayman, where we took a city tour, and then we sailed to Cozumel, Mexico where we took a glass bottom boat to the reefs off the island. We saw an amazing amount of sea life at the reef. This was well worth the money.

We then sailed to New Orleans where we got off the ship.

We had cabin 5528 Port side (left)Ocean view. We had 4 of us in this cabin for two weeks and we made it just fine. Myself, my wife , our daughter and our 4yr. old granddaughter. The granddaughter slept in the pulldown bunk with her mother and we folded the bed against the wall during the day so we had the normal amount of room during the day. we put the suitcases under the bed by putting the largest one open with the next sizes inside that one etc. Works well if you have one very large one. We had an excellent room steward named Tommy. He was from Indonesia and out of 20 cruises he was as good as we have ever had.

Our only low breath grumble was the food, and I say low breath because we ate good every single day, but the main dining room menus were hit and miss for us. This may just be a matter of taste, but we ate many meals in the Garden Buffet at night and on many occasions I believe the food was a better choice than what we saw on the MDR menu. I would go down to the MDR and take a cell phone photo, bring it back to the room and we would study it and decide if we wanted to try it or head to the Buffet. 6 nights out of 14 we headed to the buffet and out of 19 previous cruises I have never eaten at the ships buffet at night. The combination of the two options for us, up on 12 buffet or down in the MDR on 7 we never had a bad meal. One of our dining attendants in the garden Buffet was Mr. Jose Alvarez. He took extra time to carry on with our 4 yr. old granddaughter and made her smile every night. He made buffet dining an enjoyable experience for her as well as the rest of us.

The Shows and music on the ship were tops. there was always something to do or go to see on the ship.

I have two more cruises booked with Norwegian and I have never had a bad experience sailing with this line. They are like any business, They do there best and most of their people will bend over backwards to resolve any issues that may arise. I am Platinum with Carnival and by the end May 2017 I will be Platinum with Norwegian. For us it boils down now to the price and the duration and where they sail to. All in all I give Norwegian a 4 1/2 star rating. Food and the bump in the Gratuity charges to $13.50 a day per person including for a 4 yr. old is what kept them out of 5 star territory.

With NCL, there is lots of value.   We had the beverage package deal and it was great!  We have never been disappointed with NCL so expected that this cruise would be no different!   There were a few things we were disappointed in though....with our trip on the Dawn out of Boston we had the expectation that we would be able to see our New England Patriots game but due to a change in NCL cable contracts this was not available on the NFL package they had.   We were not alone in our disappointment as a majority of cruisers were also fans of the PATS.  We made the best of it.   Kudos to all the waitstaff, cabin stewards, and crew members for their great service and attention given.  We had a great time with the Cruise Activities Staff and found all of them very personable, friendly and fun!   Great Halloween Party too!

We sailed on the Dawn several years ago and were happy to see that the ship has recently been updated. Most of the public areas have been updated but the gift shops are still too small. Our balcony room was very clean, but there is a lot of empty wall space that could be used for hanging items if hooks were available.The food in the main dining rooms has also improved!

This cruise was 14 days, 7 sea days and 7 ports.  The crew and staff are very courteous and willing to go the extra mile to accommodate the passengers.

First day/night was a storm.

Not good, rough sea, wife was sea sick.

The weather was on the cool side the whole time.

This was the last cruise of the year from Boston. I can see why - is not a good

time for this cruise.

Our bathroom was flooded for almost (2) days. It was not fixed until I went to the

service desk. Room steward/supervisor did not resolve.

Food was excellent, shows were terrific as was everything else.    

Our cruise from Boston to Bermuda was good the only problem I had was that we had very turbulent seas on Saturday.  We hit a storm with 20/25 foot waves.  The Captain never came on an notified people that we hit a storm.  It would have been nice to know what we were getting into.  Other than that I have no bad things to say.

The favorite part of this cruise was the destination of Bermuda.  We had beautiful weather and a great time on the island.

Improvement in our cabin was needed.  We found underwear in one of the drawers upon arrival as well as blood on the duvet cover.  When we emptied our closet for packing to go home we found 3 pair of dirty socks and 1 pair of dirty underwear on the shelf.  Needless to say, housekeeping was not great.  Bed for 3rd guest was also bad.

We love this cruise! Have been on this ship for this cruise in 2015. Nice improvements. Ship seemed fresh and clean and new. A lot of things did not work. Minor things like bathroom doors, recepticles, lights. When told, they fixed them right away. Staff was very nice. This cruise had less time in Bermuda than previously. We did not get off the ship until after 1 pm on Sunday. The Breakaway gets there earlier! We love the island and look forward to spending as much time there as possible

Friendly staff. Great food choices. We ordered flowers for the room prior to boarding and they were lovely. We also ordered chocolate covered strawberries which were delivered. The only problem we had the all you can drink beverage option. This option does not include soda or bottled water. That I found annoying! It also had a limit on cocktails. If it exceeded $15 then they would have to pay the difference and also it was an additional surcharge for each. Talk about nickel-and-diming.

I cant recommend this cruise enough..I have taken it with Norwegian 4 times an it seems that each time it gets better..a good amount of time in Bermuda(2/ 1//2 days?) excellent dining,fun activities and entertainment in the theater..highly recommend this one!

I thought the colors used to redecorate the ship where very dreary and the patterns were too busy.  The food was better than before. We are platinum members and had to stand in a long line.  It took 1 1/2 hr. to board.

We had a fine cruise.  The food and wait staff were excellent.  the biggest problem was where the entertainment took place.  While in the piano bar in the evening you can hear and see the cleaners vacuuming on the floor above because the roof goes up 2 floors.  We actually saw fellow cruisers get water dripped onto them from the cleaners mopping the floor on the deck above.  Also the band in the Atrium has to overcome a lot of noise from the customer service desk and other ongoing business in that location.  Restaurant and buffet service was excellent.  Plenty of room on the pool deck for everyone. Our housekeeper did a great job.   All in all we will definitely consider cruising with Norwegian again ( this was our seventh Norwegian cruise ) but probably on another ship.

We definitely wish that the Bus service from Massachusetts would start up again for traveling to departures from New York