We are experienced cruisers and this was our 3rd cruise in a row with NCL within a year, but our first on the Sun.

The Pros: Best cruise coffee (which is not saying all that much but it was really nice to have drinkable coffee). Great restaurant service on port days for lunch. The show performers themselves were surprisingly talented. Nicely done tenders - no "tender nazi" as on some other lines. Amazing photographers - we got some incredible pictures that we just had to buy. Happy crew. Efficient and short life boat drill. Great musical talent overall (but they have to learn that you always play brick house and play that funky music back to back on 70's night). Amazing lead vocals by Harmony and Rhythm. Teppanyaki was good - go in the first few days. The Tapas bar was unique and a great hang out - free appetizers, a bar with good service and live entertainment. The ship layout is good for one so small. It provides a lot of variety. The excursion desk was superb, and made changing plans and even refunds painless.

Cons: -Denny the cruise director called Cruise Critic a "gossip board" and put on the worse meet and greet ever. He interrogated us instead of providing a place for us to meet each other. He left abruptly, and never sent anyone from guest services as he said he world. He did not so much as provide us a glass of water. He came dressed sloppily and seemed simply bored and at the end of his career. Quite different than his bubbly but fake stage personality. Had he been Disney trained, he would have realized you are always "on stage" when you are in front of paying guests. The people on that ship with him from CC represented 10's of thousands of dollars of revenue to NCL, and we alone had $2000 in onboard charges, not including the 2 balconies we booked. -The ship games their end-of-cruise survey, biasing the results (they pre-enter guest name and cabin information, which reduces negative comments, and they ask over and over for guests to give the highest rating, invalidating the results). They have figured out how to get the best ratings in NCL, but this causes them to ignore input from other more modern and more objective sources like Cruise Critic. -The customer service desk lied to us that they could not remove a lightweight divider between our two balconies, even though NCL corporate promised us they would. They absurdly lied that it was a structural support! If the ship is engineered with that fine a safety tolerance, nobody should sail on it and it should be scrapped. Later they admitted they DO in fact remove them, but only a certain number and you have to contact the ship itself in advanced. -The parties were weak, even with a full ship. They do not make much effort to get people involved as other NCL ships do. They do the same things as other NCL ships (like having staff dance or inviting guests to the conga line), but in a half-hearted way. -The food was considerably inferior to even Carnival. -The buffet had very limited hours, and limited selection if not right in the middle of a main meal time. -Handling of any kind of group whether it was the murder mystery team, our own group of 10, or the cruise critic group, were given worse service in general and in restaurants than when we were on our own. -Shows were costumed and choreographed amateurishly. Picture the moves from a local theatre company or a $10 show 50 miles from Vegas. -Steel drum band that does not play your favorite steel drum tunes. -They sang some interpretation of a Beatles song by Yoko on Beatles night - blech. -The "all-night" pizza place in the sports bar refused to make pizza for my adult son at 2 am, and the sushi demo that the front desk told us that was serving open sushi samples until that time turned my son away. -The coffee cups were tiny - it seemed like they were constantly trying to find ways to limit your access to the included foods and beverages. Read more