My 14 year old son and I sailed on the Getaway in July 2014. This was our 3rd cruise in 4 years. We sailed with Carnival and Royal Caribbean the last two cruises. The Getaway was the best of the 3 overall with a couple of exceptions.

Embarkation - quick and easy. One suggestion to NCL. When you check in you are given a group number to board and then you are put in a large waiting room to wait for your number to be called. They need a PA system for calling those numbers. You could not hear your group number being called.

Food - This is where we thought Royal Caribbean does a better job, but only slightly. We tend to eat the buffet. We only ate in the restaurant twice. The buffet choices seemed to be mostly the same every meal with only slight variations and were super crowded. Seats were often very hard to find. Royal's buffet had more choices and usually ample seating. We never ate at the restaurants that charged a surcharge. We wanted to try one or two, just never got around to it. The two times we did eat in the complimentary restaurant the food was good, but service was sort of slow. Read more