We took the full 13 day cruise. Even though it's advertised as a 13 day cruise, it's really a 7 day cruise to the Bahamas followed by a separate 6 day cruise up the coast to Canada/Maine. The difference between being a true 13 day cruise and two separate cruises isn't just semantics. After coming back from the Bahamas, most of the passengers on the first leg left and there's a whole new on-boarding/welcoming process. Not a big deal. The big deal is that the second half of the cruise everything got repeated. Same show every night. Same meals in the dining rooms. It began to feel like instead of ground hog day; it was ground hog week. Basically, we took back to back cruises. Just happened to be on the same ship.

Overall, the ship is starting to feel like a second class vessel compared to the newer bigger ships. It didn't help that the rock climbing wall was not available the entire 13 days due to maintenance. Seriously, I couldn't understand how they couldn't get it fixed in that time span. Dining room service was unbelievably slow resulting in 2 hour meals. We missed the first show time every night because we waited so long for our food. We are frequent cruisers and one of the things that always amazed us was how our cabin steward managed to make up our rooms every day without our seeing him/her. This time it seemed they made no effort to go to this extra level of service. We had to come back several times because he was either cleaning or was about to clean our cabin. Later on we found we weren't the only ones who were disappointed by these glitches.

Another family we met in the card room, which by the way also resulted in another absurdity. Next door was the photo studio. Every time they were showing a video to a prospective cruise passenger, they had to turn off the lights to the studio. No problem except the same lights were controlling the card room lighting. Try playing cards in the dark! We instantly bonded with the other family there that night who said they too had a number of disappointing experiences. Their explanation was that NCL has made a lot of changes (including staffing levels) that have impacted service. I wouldn't be surprised if this was true based on what we experienced as well.