This is my review of our recent cruise onboard the Norwegian Jewel, sailing out of the new Houston Cruise Terminal. The duration of the cruise was from Saturday January 3, 2015 to Saturday January 10, 2015. The itinerary was Houston-Day at Sea-Cozumel-Belize City- Trujillo, Honduras-Day at Sea-Day at Sea-Houston. This was our 17th overall cruise, and our fourth with NCL. I might add that prior to booking this cruise we booked another NCL cruise for mid-year on the Getaway, out of Miami. We are looking forward to that one.

Previous reviews of the NCL Jewel have made statements like, "the ship is showing its age."While that may be true, it is not, in my opinion the fault of the ship. It is the fault of the crew and the mindset that seems to prevail on this ship. The crew of the Jewel have apparently decided to embrace apathy as a viable work ethic. Sadly, this misguided idea seems to emanate from the top down on this vessel. Rust visible in areas frequented by passengers, wood deck rails in complete disrepair to the point of bare wood being exposed to the elements in multiple places, and, in fact part of the rail missing and replaced with nylon rope in one area, little or no real maintenance being performed by the crew, and a lackadaisical attitude by most crew members seems to be the norm. For example, this was the only time in all our cruising that our cabin steward did not make himself known to us. Never once inquiring about our needs or the state of the cabin, we literally never met him, or were absolutely sure which crewman he was. Our room was only "turned down" on two occasions prior to our retiring for the evening. Given our Latitudes level, we were supposed to have chocolate on our pillows each night. That never happened, even once. To be fair, the room was clean and well maintained. On several occasions we observed crew members making light of their duties by remarks among themselves, even during an abandon ship drill. Crew members were seen making faces at their officers behind their backs, and at customers in the gift shop as they walked away from potential sales. Their also seemed to be an abundance of casual interaction between crew members who seemed to prefer visiting with each other rather than performing their jobs. Many crew members wore no distinctive uniforms, only their small oval gold name badge, which made identifying crew more difficult. Most crew members failed to greet passengers or even to make eye contact, although the degree of this action varied by crew member.

The Jewel being a smaller ship does not have the public spaces and seating areas that larger ships enjoy. This can make finding things to see and do during the day a bit of a challenge. On the two occasions that we went looking for a ping pong table to utilize, we found three bent up tables in two locations. In both those locations the boxes labeled "table tennis equipment" were empty with no crew members working on the "Sports Deck" to ask about the location of such equipment. Again, this seems typical for this ship. Read more