don’t do this alaska cruise with young kids

Cruises: 7+ cruises

Review: 1

Helpful Votes: 15

Review summary

calling all parents with young kids. go with the disney cruise to alaska, do NOT sail on the encore. Alaska was beautiful and very worth it but this ship just plain sucks. you will be stressed and frustrated the whole time on your vacation. 1) this itinerary is terrible. you have a half day in juneau, a morning in ketchikan, and these are the 2 main towns that have interesting things to do. they switched icy strait for skagway due to a rockslide. glacier bay was awesome.victoria at 8pm is just stupid. 2) too many covid emails and not one of them was clear enough. If you are vaccinated you still need to have a negative antigen test to board the ship. we were stuck in a giant line up and then charged $75 pp for our covid tests. so many angry people in the lineup. our little one melted down after all the waiting. very unpleasant way to start the cruise. 3) the splash academy kids club was awesome, the staff was brilliant. but why have a kids club that isn’t consistently open, or worse off, has hours that require parents to be there with their kids?!?! we traveled in a large group with 7 kids under 10 and were shocked to see the pared back hours, and different hours every day. so let me get this straight, you can have your spa open at all hours, whether you are in port or not, but your kids club has to have limited hours when we are in port? the adults had to coordinate to watch each other’s kids instead of doing things together. There is nowhere else on this boat for kids to run around and enjoy themselves other than the pool area. we were so lucky and thankful to have some beautiful weather on our trip- if it had rained the whole time, my kids would have had serious cabin fever. how can you not even have a single open area, indoors or out, for kids to play for free? oh wait, becuuse you spent all that open area on the paid areas like a VR room where equipment is broken, a racetrack, laser tag, the haven, etc. the space on this boat was planned to take more money from you, not to give you a good cruising experience, and definitely not for young kids. 4) we were supposed to disembark at 7am, but we were delayed a full hour without any indication of how long the delay would be. I got called just as I was leaving my room by some asshole about a $37 charge that they could not attach to my name. I told them simply to charge it to my husband but they said we needed to come down to deck 6 for him to sign. I told him we didn’t have time to do that, and he barked the order to me again and hung up. if he had said we couldn’t leave the boat without resolving it we would have lined up at guest relations. also if i knew the lineup to leave the ship was going to be an hour, i would have sent my husband down to sign for this ridiculous charge. but how are we supposed to know if you don’t tell us anything?! we were stopped departing the boat, where we got separated. i went back to deal with the charge only to discover they could not take a new credit card where the guy was resolving issues. the same asshole who had called earlier barked at me again about getting my husband to sign and told me again to go down to deck 6 with huge lineups, even though i explained to him we have young kids and a 10am flight that the airline moved up by 2 hours, for which we were being let off the boat an hour late for (8am instead of 7am). why did he not plug in a machine to take one of my many other credit cards? My husband had disappeared down the ramp with our little ones and was headed to the taxis! i had to run to get him, he had to run back to sign, thankfully the security guy expedited the signature process and did not send him down into the belly of the boat into a massive lineup. we made our plane by a hair, we were the last to board. it was very stressful and all our kids were crying. it really marred a trip that we tried so hard to make the best of. shame on you norwegian for ending our cruise this way over something so stupid! i will never ever sail with you again!

Embarkation

Ship experiences

Food and Dining

Onboard Activities

Entertainment

Children's Programs

Service and Staff

Ship Quality

Cabin / Stateroom

Ports of call

Seattle, Washington

Juneau, Alaska

Icy Strait Point (Hoonah), Alaska

Cruise Glacier Bay

KETCHIKAN (WARD COVE), ALASKA

Victoria, British Columbia

Disembarkation

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