This was a cruise I had planned to celebrate my 60th birthday with my sister. She was my guest and birthday gift to myself. We traveled with 4 of my girlfriends as well. One of the girlfriends was a first timer so everything seemed great to her but the other 5 of us had cruised several times and so we had something to compare this cruise to.

I've cruised on NCL 2 other times and everything seemed fine but I'm not sure if the crew was still in shock from their Hurricane Sandy experiences or what? But the dining hall waiters in Tsar seemed to be in a trance the whole week. We had to ask for coffee every night and if each person didn't ask personally, you got nothing. We had to ask for salt and pepper, utensils once, and generally you just felt like you were annoying them if you tried to get their attention. The Azure staff seemed a bit more "with it."

One night in the the Azure a group of 8 children, no adults, were seated near us. The bunch ranged in age from about 14-7. Like all kids, they were loud and all the adult parties around kept looking at each other. I did speak to the maitre d on the way out about them being seated without supervision and the answer I got was, "Madame, this is a dining hall, they are allowed to come in and eat." Read more