Norwegian Spirit Review
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My wife and I sailed on the Norwegian Spirit's 12-night Grand Mediterrean, departing Barcelona on October 13 and finishing up in Venice. We have sailed on three different cruise lines previously (RCCL, Princess, and Disney), but this was our first Norwegian cruise. Overall, we were impressed with our cruise on the Spirit. A summary of our experience, including some "good to know" things about the Spirit, follows.
Embarkation in Barcelona was fairly quick and painless. At embarkation the cruise staff did, however, take control of our passports for the duration of the cruise, which we had never experienced before on a cruise and troubled us a bit. The staff person could not explain why she took our passports, but handed us a piece of paper which, in the fine print, stated that "as during this cruise we will be leaving and entering the Schengen Area . . . Norwegian Cruise Lines must . . . present all Non European passports to the Greek Immigration officials."
We had an oceanview cabin, number 4580 down on deck four. The location of this particular cabin was not ideal, and I discuss the location problem below. Otherwise, the layout of the cabin was generally OK. On the plus side, the bed was comfortable and the bathroom layout was the best of any cruise ship we had been on previously. When you enter the bathroom you have the sink area in front of you, with the toilet to the left (with its own sliding privacy door) and the shower to your right (again, with its own sliding privacy door). The shower was also of good size, which I appreciated being myself of pretty good size. The hairdryer was mounted on the wall and kind of old -- my wife said it did the job, but just barely. Our cabin steward, Alex, was also excellent. He took care of all the normal cleaning and replenishment issues, and went above and beyond in little ways. For example, we brought wine aboard that we bought in the duty free shop in the Barcelona cruise terminal, and Alex, without prompting, provided us with clean wine glasses each and every day. He also filled up our ice bucket each day, again, without prompting. On the down side, the rug and cabin walls were showing a bit of wear. Also, the view of the ocean in our cabin was through a very small circular porthole, maybe about 18 inches across. The porthole did not let in much light, and it was difficult to see anything through it because the bed was immediately below the porthole. We have been in oceanview cabins on other ships with much larger windows.
Cabin Review
Mid-Ship Oceanview Porthole Window
Cabin 4580 is in the corridor immediately adjacent to the gangway that is used for ingress and egress on the port side when the ship docks to that side. Also, this gangway is used by the harbor pilots when they embark. So when the gangway is opened, it is quite noisy -- a lot of grinding and clanking and metal-on-metal sounds for maybe two or three minutes. This happens most days between 7:00 AM and 8:00 when the harbor pilots come aboard, but sometimes even earlier than that. So unless you are a very early riser, or a very heavy sleeper, this will wake you up. Also, the security officer's office is immediately across the corridor from the cabin, so often we would open our door and the security officer would be sitting right there, which is not really ideal. And the first day we had port call in Toulon, peopole actually lined up outside our door waiting to disembark, and we could hear them laughing and joking, which was irritating. Fortunately, the security officer put a stop to that, and we had almost no queuing up in the corridor after that first day. In fairness, I should mention that our cabin location did have three positive aspects: 1) We could get right to our room about ten seconds after reboarding the ship in each port; 2) we were very close to the midship elevators and so could travel from our cabin to anywhere in the ship pretty quickly, and 3) the cabin location in the middle of the ship, and on a lower level, means less rocking in heavy seas. Having said all that, we recommend you get an alternative cabin if NCL assigns you to cabin 4580.