The buffet was overcrowded, during peak times you couldn't find a table, especially on colder days, when the outside section was closed off (we sailed in the winter from New York).
Onboard Activities
1 out of 5
There are two small pools, one adult-only, the other for the general public. The kids pool was filled up with parents with younger, non-swimming kids in life vests. There was no space for swimming kids to play. And the anticipated water slide has been taken down. My kids did do the rock climbing thing once and they were not excited enough to go back to it.
Also, internet was painfully slow, like a dial-up modem. The 150 free minutes everyone had were really like 60 minutes, considering how much stuff you were actually able to achieve while online. And the bandwidth was horrible, I couldn't even send pictures to my parents!
If you wanted to have more internet access (of the same quality), you had to pay $30 a day for a single device, and a package for multiple devices with good internet was ridiculously expensive! Even internal internet network was horrible, half the time we couldn't send messages to each other to coordinate our activities. Setting up good internet service is a one-time expense, after which good internet access would be almost free for Norwegian. They either are too cheap to invest in good equipment or are throttling internet access to entice passengers into paying a lot of money for it.
Entertainment
2 out of 5
The entertainment program was soooo disappointing! Evening shows were lame (hypnosis, anyone?). During the day they had all those standard trivia and bingo games, which did not seem to appeal to anyone younger than 65. Most of the "educational" sessions had the end goal of extracting money from passengers (liqueur testings, presentations of jewelry from the onboard shops, art showings, how good for you massage and spa treatments are). The rest were really weird: non-traditional healing, diagnosis by pupils and pulse, and weird stuff like that. There were three sessions "painted by you" sessions, which were fun, but filled up quickly. I would've loved doing more than one, but couldn't get in.
Children's Programs
1 out of 5
I have two kids, ages 15 and 11. The older one had the time of his life! He hit it off with a bunch of other teens during their first exciting meeting, and after that we barely saw him at all, he was doing stuff with his friends until 1 am or later.
But my 11-year-old was miserable. They have one club for kids ages 3-12 (!!!). It's a smallish room with crafts tables and a sport games area, plus a separate room with a couple of Nintendo switches. The most that place could fit is 20-25 kids (if that), after which they turned people away. There were 500 kids onboard. Take away teenagers and babies/toddlers, there must've been 200-300 kids of ages 3-12 whose parents were dying to have some adult time. A line to get into the club started to form half an hour before the opening times (10am -12pm, 2pm - 4pm, 7pm - 11 pm).
There was supposed to be a separate program within that club for kids ages 10-12, but how can you have a separate program in a room of kids of such a large age gap! Older kids neither had the chance to spend time together to form relationships, nor did they want to hang out in a room full of little kids. My husband and I ended up entertaining our daughter ourselves, to minimize her time on the iPad.
There were a LOT of very pissed of parents on that cruise.
Service and Staff
4 out of 5
It was mostly ok. Some bartenders were really grumpy. We heard so much about towel animals meeting you in the room each day, but our steward didn't do them, to great disappointment of our daughter. He was pretty new to the job, as were, apparently, many others among the crew.
Ship Quality
4 out of 5
Everything was definitely very clean, but the pools and the kids club room were too small.
Cabin / Stateroom
5 out of 5
I was surprised by how spacial the cabin was! I expected much more cramped quarters, but there was enough room for everything, a lot of storage, shelves, drawers, etc.
Ship tip
If you have kids ages 3-12 and want to have them entertained, pick a different ship. Inadeqate childcare was the worst sore point for many parents.
If you are into planes, this island is for you! It has a world-famous beach that lies directly under a fly path of planes going to/from the island airport and so planes fly right over your head. For my son, who's crazy about planes, it was the highlight of the trip. I went on a history tour. It was not your exciting tour of a big city or beautiful countryside. They island is kind of shabby, but the history is interesting, so I enjoyed it.
There is really nothing there but beaches. We were interested in off-the-beach snorkeling, so while most people went to a big touristy beach, we took a taxi to Brewer's Cove, a small empty beach with reefs starting just a few yards from the shore. Our friends went on a tour of some caves and were thrilled.
Unfortunately, the ship was in port only from 6am to 1pm, so unless you're an early morning person, you won't be able to make that cave tour, or anything similar, which starts at like 7am. Which is a shame, we would've really wanted to go, but 7am is just not for us. I wished the stop there was longer.
Luggage handling was very chaotic. Pieces of luggage were supposed to be grouped by cabin number but the grouping was messed up and we had to look for our stuff in different places.
I was also on this cruise and was disappointed with the entertainment. And the painfully slow internet. We had 3 rooms and it took almost the full trip for guest services to get the rooms linked properly. We heard 80% of the crew was new and only their 2nd cruise since coming off dry dock. And with hardly anything to do, it was horrible being stuck in NYC for almost 3 days….
You have to do your research. This is a ship geared toward teens and older. It’s an older and smaller ship for NCL. Newer/bigger ships more geared towards younger children. The entertainment on these older ships is also not spectacular.
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