Norwegian Gem Cruise Reviews - Reviews

This cruise is a blast. More of an older crowd but even as a Solo Traveler made a lot of friends on this one.

For the price paid,not worth it. Did not enjoy this ship.

This was my first cruise. Initially it seemed awesome, but quickly became overpacked and was crowded everywhere. The food was terrible. Drinks were okay at first, but tasted watered down towards the end of the day. Woke up at 3:30 am because we couldn't sleep and everything was closed except for the Irish restaurant, which just had a limited food menu and non alcoholic drinks until 7am. The water/ice stations were shut down too. Casino was open but bar was not. Pools/hot tubs all closed. Just felt like cattle. Staff was rude most of the time. I wouldn't recommend it, there wasn't enough to do on the ship.

We enjoyed ourselves but having 6 days at sea (1 cancel, 1 was the lock day and only got 1 hour to get off boat), I will pick cruises with more port days. Our last cruise was only 1 day at sea and would have liked at least 2. So somewhere in the middle of that for a 10-11 day cruise. Loved the ship, loved the crew. We had a great time.

If you do not cruise a lot, then this one (11 nts) may be too long for you, as it was for us. We did get away from "winter" for a few weeks, but there are more meaningful ways to spend your travel money.

Nice ship but needs more staff. Very hard to get a drink in the place , long waits. Especially the martini bar. Staff remained calm under the pressure and never rude . Manu Manoharan martini bar bartender is excellent , but he is just one man with lots of thirsty cruisers. I take my hat off to him .

Thank goodness we ported six times. If we had to stay on the ship for more than two days, we would have been bored and service was poor. We had a great trip despite the ship just being basic and okay.

Cruise was fun until the end. The onboard game shows etc were corny and the cruise director was more into herself and her image. The servers and crew were awesome but the cruise director and her team were corny and marginal. English was bad and couldn’t pronounce anything correctly and hard to understand and we are young retirees that have good hearing. If I hear I’m Johnny all the way from Brazil one more time…. At the end of 15 days it became a running joke.

The cruise went quite well. The only negatives I have are as follows: A) could use more onboard entertainment. Too much time in between entertainment venues. B) The ship did not provide American football, even though the majority of the customers were from the US. Too much soccer being shown to only a few.

Glad I went, but wouldn’t choose this ship again. Service was fine. NCL wants passengers to return over and over, but doesn’t really change the onboard experience.

An enjoyable experience! Food is good except Chinese food and Teppanyaki.

The cruise was a great value for the price. Lots to do on the ship, and enough places to eat. I found the restaurant seemed to have the same menu each night, and in two restaurants, each had the same menu as the other. There was quite a variety of excursion choices- something for everyone. Or you could venture out into each city on your own. I've taken quit a few cruises, and this was one of the better ones.

Absolutely loved this cruise and the entire experience. We will highly recommend this trip for anyone wanting to go to any of these ports, but can't decide which place to stay. This is the best way to see and experience all these incredible places!

Great experience. Also too much to take in. Very busy everyday! Walking 10,000 steps per day…and we still didn’t see everything.

I was very disappointed with what was offered per your advertisements and your sales agents selling me this expensive vacation. I paid for both rooms 10006 and 10002. I was very unhappy with the Concierge Service and Butler Service. They were basically nonexistent. Although they did send me a small tray of small bites every night, I guess to appease me? Nashira Forbes was the worst concierge I have ever dealt with and I have traveled a lot. Her condescending attitude was the worst, unless of course you were one of her favorites. She did not listen to our concerns, her directions were not clear or precise and she did not go out of her way in any possible act to try and remedy the situation or try and make our Honeymoon Trip better in any possible way.

Ports were beautiful, food and drink were very good. However, NCL Gem has work ahead to improve customer service approach pre cruise, during cruise and post cruise.

Overall, we had fun. Party of 8. We enjoyed this cruise more than most others we have been on. It did not seem to be as crowded in shared spaces, which made a huge difference. However, the omission of Venice, and the lack of communication from NCL was extremely disappointing and stressful. There was no need for that. I won't trust NCL to communicate truthfully and openly with me in the future. I am positive they purposefully did not inform us of the change in itinerary. I can't imagine why they thought that would be a good idea though. There were a lot of frustrated and angry passengers, needless to say.

Good experience, but some of the admin related to purchased packages was a negative

great cruise but disappointing last minute notification of no cruise ship visit to Venice and poor bus visit arrangement.

The concierge we spoke to prior to the cruise (at 855-625-4283) did not follow through on my requests. I had to ask the butler and cabin attendant to handle things after we embarked though I specifically asked to have this handled prior to embarkation! NCL never sent us priority luggage tags though we were in a suite, the entire ship had to search for our luggage and we received it 5 hours after we embarked. That is unacceptable in a suite, forget the stress we had believing it was left behind! NCL has extremely poor communication! Very poor! No info regarding which dock we were arriving at, no one could tell us so we almost missed a shore excursion as the tour operator went to Tobaco Dock in Lisbon but we were at the other dock. With a knee that was bone on bone, I had to go back into the ship to get help; they sent me back out to the NCL shore excursion guy to help us though it was not an NCL excursion. That guy (who looks like Gary Busey) was mean and useless and clearly he had no interest in helping. I had to go back on board a second time (long walk on a bad knee) and our concierge called the tour operator to figure out what to do. Why do you not have travelogues of each port we docked at to give clients an idea of what they might want to know? The info on the TV was pretty useless! And why do you not provide maps of each port because some ports had maps, one charged a euro for a map and several had none. Um really? Too much money for NCL to provide them to their clients? NCL did not communicate that there was a "Behind The Scenes" tour; we asked once we got on board but it was full! How is that possible? Why does NCL not have down loadable maps of each deck available to clients after they book (even have them on board if you don't want us to print ahead of time). The NCL web site has diagrams but unprintable unless you want to print many pages, cut them up, tape together, decrease the size to use them. The diagrams by the elevators are useless except to give you a generic idea of what is what. No instructions as to how the wi fi worked and it took 3 employees to help us figure it out. Why are there not written instructions. Though I did a screen shot each time I logged on and off wi fi (many times after 1 or 2 minutes as it never loaded) I had proof yet the log showed I used 50 minutes while off the ship on a shore excursion...impossible...and 70 minutes while we were at dinner. Yet...each time I logged off and had proof that I did not forget to log off. Yes, they gave me back those two sets of minutes but the rest was just a nightmare trying to accomplish anything on wi fi! What a joke! The afternoon savory and sweet canapes/snacks were simply the most boring and repetitive offerings ever. At least 4 times we got a plate with chocolate candies...not great chocolates and not good! You all couldn't even do chocolate covered strawberries at least once??? You couldn’t vary the savory canapes instead of the same ones day in and day out? The shops are also really boring...same old, same old! Liquor, souvenirs and jewelry. If you had a boutique or two, women would buy clothes and accessories I assure you! Impossible to believe we found not one thing to buy that was cool, different or interesting! The room service form is ridiculous...it doesn't list all the breakfast items including toast, english muffins etc. We had to write all over the back of that menu which was just ridiculous and made it hard to read for the butler to decipher??? Why??? Revise it unless it is too much trouble??? The art auction was a joke! We compared it to the one on the Panama Canal cruise last March (2022) which was organized with efficient staff. This one was chaotic, disorganized and on one they registered people but wouldn't let them in to peruse the artwork so that just delayed the whole shebang! The lighting in the living room was atrocious; you simply could not read or write in such dim lighting that pointed everywhere except where you would sit. We had to rearrange our suite, moved the couch under the lights and our cabin attendant brought us a floor lamp. This made it palatable but why would it require that? As far as room service which we had often...the blueberry muffins were very dry, the french fries were rarely hot and often undercooked, coffee often not hot in the pot, cole slaw was served in a tiny "bowl" and I use that term loosely...the bowl was about the size of a fifty cent piece? Finally, the Mallorca port was hell on earth! The walk from the ship to the outside of the port was horrific; you all provided shuttle buses to take people to the Cathedral but they refused to allow those of us who were handicapped to get a ride. The NCL staff could not have cared less; they were all yelling and basically said...too bad...start walking. We did not care if you wanted to charge us for a shuttle but to do nothing....nah...that is a violation of ADA!!! You should be ashamed! So...I'm as tired of writing this as you are of reading it! I plan to send a cleaner version the the NCL CEO's and President so no worries. I think they should know we wouldn't cruise with NCL ever again if you offered me a free around the world cruise, that is how serious I am. Going back to Celebrity! P.S. Why would NCL take credit in their ratings for whether or not a port was great? You should be asking how your shore excursions were in each port because those were a zero!