It's better to fly from Quebec City. Great ship but not this cruise.

Cruises: 7+ cruises

Reviews: 4

Helpful Votes: 117

Review summary

The ship is really nice. Although they’ve announced that the rebuild next year will get rid of some of the nice aspects so they can add some more Haven cabins. We went near some bad weather. Nothing anyone could do about that. So we missed a port. Corner Brook was Total waste of time. They have several specialty restaurants. We had prepaid for four meals. We didn’t get into any of the good ones because the restaurants are small, and the usable times were taken on the first day. We didn’t have any idea what we were going to do, so we waited until a couple days before. If they are going to charge for a package it would be nice if they would have enough seats to make it feasible to use. The two production shows (Footloose and Elements) were phenomenal. Footloose was frankly as good as a Broadway show we saw a few days earlier. Elements is beautiful. But the lounge entertainment leaves a lot to be desired. There’s a difference between someone who can play a lot of songs on a piano and an entertainer who plays the piano or guitar. Hatfield is an entertainer; Inna knows a lot of songs and she starts on time; Tahana showed up, but almost made a point that he wasn’t interested. Garden café seems uselessly bound to a schedule. If it opens at 6 am the food is there at 5:30, getting cold and dry. Why? If a few people are there early why not open it so that they can eat what’s there? It’s not going to hurt anything to eat it while it’s fresh. And generally, they should open earlier. I know that most people get up late, but some are early risers. When we arrived at the NYC port at the end of the cruise, NCL had their elaborate color-coding of luggage – coded for the time sequence. We had an early flight, so got the first group (7 AM). When we got off the ship (almost an hour late) and talked to the port personnel, those people said that NCL never cleared that with them, and that no one could get any luggage until all luggage was in the port and sorted. The first luggage group (ours) was in the middle of the pile of luggage, so we had to climb through the luggage sorted around it. Also, this ship seems worse than others in management of return at stops. Don’t they know how many people have to come in? Getting back on the ship and through the security check-in was always a long process. In one port we had a 45-minute line. A related problem is that they seemed to be unaware that there would be a lot more activity at some times rather than others. For example, there was one guy working at the internet info desk every day. But lots of people needed help on the first couple days. The lines were forever. And why is it so hard to get onto the ship internet? The lines are long at the internet desk because so few people can understand the complexity. And of course, because the internet is so bad, and people don’t understand why. It’s like NCL isn’t aware of anything that has happened in the last 10 (20) years. They seem to like to find additional ways to make money (similar things happened on previous NCL cruises). You have to check everything: • Before I left the ship, I got a printout of my ship account. (I had checked previously, but because of prior experience I knew that NCL might add something.) I told them that one charge was clearly not mine (it was a bar charge for things covered by the package). After some discussion they said they’d write it off, but that had to wait until the bar processed the credit, so they couldn’t print out a corrected listing. The charge on my credit card is less than the original amount but didn’t credit the entire bogus charge. I’ve never received a corrected statement. • We had skipped one port, so we were due credit for port charges. They said that was $5.00. I said that was a surprising amount. The customer service person just kind of chuckled. • We bought two separate back-to-back cruises. Each included 150 minutes per person of “free” premium internet. NCL combined the two cruises together so that we didn’t get the 150 minutes already paid for on the second cruise. The wi-fi person didn’t know why, or how to fix it. Neither of us got the "free" 150 minutes.

Embarkation

Ship experiences

Food and Dining

Onboard Activities

Entertainment

Service and Staff

Ship Quality

Cabin / Stateroom

Ports of call

Quebec City, Quebec

La Baie, Quebec

Corner Brook, Newfoundland

Halifax, Nova Scotia

Disembarkation

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