Would rank Excellent if not so expensive (and the Belize stop was not Harvest Caye)

This was the right cruise for our group which ranged from age 18 to 77.  There will always be pros and cons:

Pros:

Activities: Water slides - we loved the scary ones that dropped out under your feet and the slower one on the inner-tube.  The clear tube section over the edge of ship was spectacular.  Loved the ropes course with zip line 20 stories over the side of the ship.  Entertainment: Shows were great with amazing talent but only two for a week was a little underwhelming.  Comedy shows were nice as was the dueling pianos.  Park West did a good job with the art auction.  I actually bought a painting after three days of contemplation.  Fastest internet I have experienced on a cruise ship. 

Cabin: mid-ship mini-suite: nice, clean, good storage, great sized bathroom with walk-in shower. very quiet.  Loved the buttons that lit up indicators in the hall to let your steward know when you are "At Home", "Make up room" or "Do Not Disturb".  Our steward, Jocelyn, was awesome.  She kept us clean, stocked, got our bill right and did not bug us.  Great towel animals and chocolate covered strawberries.  They brought me foam pillows upon request.  There will be feathers if you don't ask for foam.  They will give you extension cord if you need it for CPAP.  No chair or coffee table.  Balcony was kind of small

TV very limited: the usual NCL channels, several news channels, one TV favorites channel and one movie channel.  They showed some movies around the ship at times.

Ports: Loved visiting my monkeys at Gumbalimba Park and there is great beach snorkeling on Roatan at Tabayana Beach - we did ship excursion.  Loved that money for that park goes to rescuing animals and feeding the wild animals on the island that would otherwise be threatened by the deforestation (plus the islanders eat the endangered iguanas on the rest of the island so they need the protected area).  LOTS of fish right off the beach.  Most parrot fish I've ever seen in one place.  Just be careful, it is shallow.  Use a guide if you don't know what you are doing.  I got fire coral scrape last time. 

Had a great Discover Scuba ship excursion on Costa Maya.  Dreamtime Dive Resort were very professional and very safe.  They did a class and had participants practice the skills in shallow water before taking them over their head.  Then took them to a nice reef with some fish.  They are still recovering from a hurricane but there was more to see than Discover scuba excursions elsewhere.  Very good student to instructor ratio made me feel my nephew was safe on his first scuba experience.

Cozumel: I did Captain's Choice Certified Scuba = ship excursion.  The Dive Shop was also very professional.  Carmello earned a very nice tip from me.  He spent 15-20 minutes and an extra safety stop looking for the my camera that I dropped on the ocean floor.  And he found it!  We saw some great reefs and walls.  Turtles were plentiful and we saw a nurse shark, gigantic lobsters, lots of fish and a green moray eel.

Food: Buffet was great.  Clean, great variety and taste.  Plenty of seating. Many, many stations for each food section so you don't spend a lot of time standing in line.  Food in specialty restaurants was good to great.  (except see below).  Great variety of restaurants.  If you do one of the pick two promotions, then you can get three specialty meals for two people free.  You need a little variety on a week long cruise so we were glad we did this.  The Italian was our favorite and Le Bistro was second.  But the three main dining rooms were nice with live entertainment in the Manhattan Room.

Most of the embarkations and disembarkations were smooth and you would never know that there were 5,100 people on the ship.

Loved the little fish in the carpet that told us which direction we were headed on the ship. 

Mini golf was nice to have in the shade which is something other ships could learn from but it was small. 

Tyler the cruise director was great.  He was everywhere.  He was in the John Hughes 80's show, he played drums in the dueling piano show.  He just popped up everywhere you went.  Very lively and kept things running smoothly.

The Assistant Food and Beverage Director was also EVERYWHERE.  We saw him supervising every single meal we ate at every single restaurant.  He would be in the buffet at 7 a.m. and the specialty restaurants at 10 p.m. as well as all the main dining rooms.  We started to wonder if there was a teleportation system for Tyler and the F&B guy.

Cons:

The first disembarkation at the first port was a nightmare.  They had all the excursions at the same time since Carnival was coming in a few hours later.  There were so many people crammed into the stairwell that I got claustrophobic and was literally shaking by the time we finally got off the ship.  They really needed to group people before they got off the ship like they do on their smaller ships if they are going to have all the excursions at once.

There was live music or game shows twenty feet from the shore excursion desk which meant forty feet from the guest services desk.  Why in the world would you have such a set up where you have to scream in their faces.  We did not have to go to either desk much but the three times we did, it was a very bad experience. 

Food service was very slow.  Three hours to eat a meal at the French restaurant.  The Tepanyaki restaurant was not good at all.  We left before desert which people said was the worst thing they ever tasted.  They said the cake tasted like grass.  Some of the chefs were entertaining but they were literally two feet apart with eight chefs yelling and banging in one room which ruined the experience.  Lack of choice on appetizers, salad, soup and desert also took away from the experience.

My least favorite part of the ship was the pool area.  There were plenty of lounge chairs because most people did not even bother to hang out at the pool.  They literally had the same size pools on this giant ship that they would have on a ship that was half this size.  They needed a giant lagoon style pool or at least four pools to accommodate 5,100 people.  It was made even worse by the fact that the pool was about six feet deep so you can only hang out around the edges.  Thus the pool could accommodate about a quarter of the number of people than a regular ship pool. 

But the most disappointing part of this trip was Harvest Caye.  They continue to advertise snorkeling at Harvest Caye but the company that did the snorkeling quit on them.  And there is no diving option.  Snorkeling or diving in Belize was the bucket list item I wanted to cross off on this ship and I found out one month before the cruise that they were not offering snorkeling.  You cannot snorkel off the beach there...yet they rent snorkel equipment.  It is murky, there are jelly fish and there is nothing to see.  There was a nice pool but I can go to a nice pool two miles from my house.  The one restaurant was expensive with a limited menu and slow service.  If it were just me, I would have cancelled this cruise when I read about Harvest Caye and gone on a different cruise line.  But this cruise was for my nephew and he loved the zip line. 

Overall, it was a great cruise but I think NCL could do a little work and earn that great deal of extra money they charged.