Worst cruise experience I've ever had

An absolute mess. No one working there could tell anyone where the bag drop was or the line for the ship was, they were several hours behind (we asked what happened to the check-in time windows and the staffer said they were "out the window" less than an hour after boarding was supposed to have begun), there was no shade or access to water while waiting outdoors in the LA sun for over two hours, and no announcements from staff about what the hold-up was. There were similar delays both in and out of almost every port, to the point that shore excursions got routinely cut short or canceled because there was no longer enough time to complete them. Two separate shore excursions I paid over $100 apiece for had to cut out parts I was really looking forward to because there wasn't enough time because the ship was late.

The main dining room was only open for dinner the entire cruise for some reason, which meant the buffet was always INSANELY crowded and there weren't any other free options for sit-down service (except one--see next note). Also, all but one of the times we ate in the dining room, our meals had mistakes. It was very clear that the staff waiting on us either did not speak English well enough to understand our requests (simple stuff, like asking for a side of asparagus), or were too new to know how to implement them. There was also only ONE free food option after 9:30pm (The Local), and it a) had no outdoor seating (the indoor seating was right above a stage so it was always incredibly loud there), b) was not actually open 24 hours a day like they claim on their website (it closed at 4am on our cruise), and c) for some baffling reason did not permit you to take the food out of the restaurant, so if you wanted a late dinner you literally had to risk exposing yourself to Covid (and also deafness, considering how loud the band always was). If they're gonna keep charging $10 for room service, they really need a 24/7 takeout option. Especially considering that the boat was so short staffed (I'm guessing a LOT of covid among crew, considering how virtually zero staffers were wearing masks and covid was very much on the ship) that they couldn't even get enough people manning the buffet to make sure everyone used hand sanitizer before eating. Oh, and speaking of room service, they didn't bother to inform us that there woud be no hot breakfast service on the last day, nor did they bother to inform us that they were out of yogurt, so they charged us $5 to literally deliver a plate of fruit and we still had to go up to the buffet to eat.

We didn't avail ourselves of a lot of it, for several reasons, so I can only speak to a few things. First, all that cool stuff they brag about, like their VR games and the like, that they charge $8 a pop for--I went up to check it out, very excited to buy some play, only to read on each individual game placard that the average play time was 90 to 120 seconds. NO WAY am I paying $8 for less than 2 minutes of play. So there went that. For other things, like the race cars or the laser tag and even the main show productions, you needed reservations. BUT they don't let you book reservations until you get on the ship. And by the time we actually managed to GET on the ship, many, many things were already completely booked up by the people who had boarded before us. This is a terrible system; if they are going to require reservations, they should allow you to book online before you board. Lastly, I tried to use the water slide five separate times and it was never open. I'm not sure it was ever open even once on the entire sailing.

As for the big theater productions, they ran two of the same shows for two nights each, so there wasn't actually a mainstage performance every night like there is on most other ships. Also, the lead actor in Footloose was TERRIBLE. Like, practically tone-deaf kind of terrible. I mean SO BAD that after the show, whole rooms and elevators full of strangers were commiserating with each other about how he was so off key it was almost painful to listen to, and were speculating that maybe both the actual star, the understudy, and all the floaters must've been sick so they just pulled in a random ensemble dancer who could learn the choreography whether he could sing or not. It was just. SO bad. Elements wasn't much better--the magician was doing tricks you'd see in an 8th grade magic show, and mostly it was just a bunch of dancing rather than the Cirque-style performances they were selling the show as. (The costumes, however, were excellent. Kudos to that department!) There was an aerialist pair who were absolutely fantastic, but they only performed for about five minutes together, which is a shame because they were the only truly impressive act in the bunch.

Our room steward only serviced the room once a day instead of the usual twice, and he did a TERRIBLE job. We would come back to find hair still sitting on the shower drain. We had to track him down to get clean towels. The floor wasn't vacuumed once the entire week. We found a random pill under the bed from, presumably, the prior occupants of the room. The sofa bed was never made back up into a couch for use during the day, and the one time it was, we called housekeeping twice over the course of three hours to get them to turn it back into a bed so I could sleep and finally ended up making it into a bed ourselves because it was already 10pm and nobody ever showed up. It took two days of asking for me to get a coffee maker and a THIRD day to get coffee and mugs. I spent 20 minutes tracking down an employee who had a pen I could use to fill out my luggage tags because one hadn't been left in the room. And all this I could've maybe waved off except for how they ended up handling covid infections on board. My roommate had a positive rapid test on Day 5. We informed medical and guest services to arrange quarantine. Guest services told us repeatedly, in no uncertain terms, that there wasn't a single empty cabin on the entire ship and consequently no place to quarantine him. They also repeatedly told us they were just "following CDC guidelines" by leaving two other healthy people stuck in a tiny room with him, even though by doing that they were virtually guaranteeing that we would both also contract a potentially deadly disease. I pointed out that they had both a moral and a legal obligation to keep their passengers safe and forcing us into the same space as a verified covid positive patient was not how you did that. The guest services manager came out to talk to me and repeatedly insisted that a) there were no empty cabins to isolate him in, and b) she couldn't even take our word for him being positive (despite us literally having the positive rapid test) and that nothing else could be done until he went up to medical and paid $150 for a PCR test. So we went up to medical and asked what the point of even doing that was if there was nowhere to put him once the test was confirmed anyway, and medical just kept telling us that they couldn't keep him up in medical and couldn't do anything else without their own $150 PCR test but, cryptically, that they might be able to arrange something if he tested positive with them. So we bit the bullet and spent the money, and then somehow, MAGICALLY, a free cabin opened up for him to quarantine in. Guest services gave us some ridiculous excuse about how they had to call corporate to see if there were cancellations and weren't allowed to even tell us that they had to call corporate until corporate told them there was a room available. And anyway who's canceling on day 5 of a 7 day cruise? That is NOT HOW IT WORKS. Anyway, we lost the entire day to the crazy stress of a) having a sick roommate and thinking we'd be getting stuck with him and infected too, and b) being bounced around from one department to the next and back again because nobody was willing to take responsibility for the problem. Medical told us that according to CDC guidelines, they no longer maintained isolation space, but frankly, if you are sailing with so many covid-infected crew that you can't even serve breakfast and lunch in the dining room or clean a cabin shower, you ABSOLUTELY have an obligation to leave empty cabins for people to isolate in when they inevitably get sick (and for the record, we were some of the only passengers on the entire ship wearing N95s in ALL indoor spaces at ALL times, and somehow he still caught it; just imagine how many people who never masked must have gotten it too). The fact that they claimed they hadn't is unconscionable. The fact that it turned out they DID somehow have a single room after we spent $150 extra at medical is also unconscionable. When we pointed all this out, the guest services manager had the nerve to suggest we should be grateful that they didn't charge us $500 for the isolation cabin and also that they gave our sick, isolated roomie free internet so he didn't go stir-crazy locked in a keyless room for the next 2.5 days. But wait--it gets worse! They told us that on debarkation day, medical would meet us at our cabins at 7:30am and escort us off the ship (even me and my other roomie who tested covid negative) first thing before anyone else got off so we wouldn't expose anyone else. (Apparently, as "close contacts" with an infected person, we were too big of a risk to allow us to debark with everyone else, but somehow NOT too big of a risk to give us free reign of the ship in the two days prior to debarkation? (Again, this only makes sense in the context of money: if they isolated us too, we couldn't drink or gamble, so we were safe as long as there was money to be made, and then dangerous the moment there wasn't.) Anyway, 7:30 came and went and nobody had picked us up. Nobody was answering in medical. Other passengers were already debarking. We finally got a hold of someone in guest services who said they'd notify housekeeping because they thought housekeeping was going to escort us off. We informed them that wasn't what we'd been told. They put us on hold for several minutes and must've finally figured things out because EVENTUALLY, medical came to get us. They took us through crew hallways, but then just had us wait in the stair landing on deck 6 that every other passenger on the ship was walking right past, because there were other covid positive guests and they needed to walk us off all at once. This was SO TERRIBLE? A bunch of covid positive people were literally standing there, some not even in masks, coughing on every other passenger as they debarked. Plus the ship was, once again, exposing covid-negative "close contacts" to the virus by making us wait together in a tight clump, this time with multiple covid patients instead of just one. And while we were waiting for the rest of the infected groups, we found out that one woman was indeed forced to stay in her cabin with her covid positive husband and, surprise surprise, got infected from him. Norwegian's policy for managing covid infections is at best callously disastrous and at worst criminally negligent, and they way they just kept insistently saying "CDC Guidelines" as if that somehow absolved them of all responsibility for the choices they made in the name of profits was just... so infuriating. What an absolute mess.

The ship itself has very little outdoor space--there's no traditional lido deck outdoor seating outside the buffet so if you want to eat outside to avoid Covid risk you are just constantly bombarded with 100-decible music. Most of the rest of the space that would traditionally be available to all cruisers was held in reserve for the fancy suite buyers. Unless you have your own private balcony or are willing to go deaf, there is basically nowhere outside to sit and read. Even their "deck 8 promenade" that they talk so much about on their website is blasting music all the time.

We booked a suite specifically to have more space for three passengers, but it didn't work out that way--the room was really no bigger than a standard balcony. The one really great thing about the room was the shower, which was huge and had magnificent water pressure. Otherwise, it was pretty terrible. The sofa bed wasn't level, so I ended up sleeping on a slant. There were no drawers in the room at all (just shelves). They didn't even bother to leave a pen and a pad of paper in the room, so I had to hunt one down to fill out my debarkation luggage tags. The room was never clean. I even found a random pill on the floor from, presumably, the prior occupant.

They told us that on debarkation day, medical would meet us at our cabins at 7:30am and escort us off the ship (even me and my other roomie who tested covid negative) first thing before anyone else got off so we wouldn't expose anyone else. (Apparently, as "close contacts" with an infected person, we were too big of a risk to allow us to debark with everyone else, but somehow NOT too big of a risk to give us free reign of the ship in the two days prior to debarkation? (Again, this only makes sense in the context of money: if they isolated us too, we couldn't drink or gamble, so we were safe as long as there was money to be made, and then dangerous the moment there wasn't.) Anyway, 7:30 came and went and nobody had picked us up. Nobody was answering in medical. Other passengers were already debarking. We finally got a hold of someone in guest services who said they'd notify housekeeping because they thought housekeeping was going to escort us off. We informed them that wasn't what we'd been told. They put us on hold for several minutes and must've finally figured things out because EVENTUALLY, medical came to get us. They took us through crew hallways, but then just had us wait in the stair landing on deck 6 that every other passenger on the ship was walking right past, because there were other covid positive guests and they needed to walk us off all at once. This was SO TERRIBLE? A bunch of covid positive people were literally standing there, some not even in masks, coughing on every other passenger as they debarked. Plus the ship was, once again, exposing covid-negative "close contacts" to the virus by making us wait together in a tight clump, this time with multiple covid patients instead of just one. Finally we got walked off the ship down a separate gangway and dumped far outside the pickup point for cars or taxis. They just left us there to figure things out for ourselves; we were officially no longer their problem and they clearly did not care about us at all.