We are a family of three me, my husband, and 7 month old son. We also traveled with my parents. This is our 2nd cruise, both with NCL, 1st with our son. We had a great time and would do it over in heartbeat! We chose NCL for the freestyle cruising, which we like and my parents loved! We are not real fancy people so I liked not having to dress up just to go to dinner. We usually wore slacks with a nice shirt to dinner.

Precruise: We found it cheaper to fly into Ft Lauderdale (FLL) the day before the cruise. We stayed in FLL at the Renaissance Hotel Pine Island. We got a great deal on the rooms there ($80 a night thru bidding on priceline 4 star hotels). The hotel was great and was about an easy 8 minute drive from the airport. We did a one-way rental thru Hertz and dropped it off at the Port of Miami location the AM of the cruise.

Embarkation: Was a nightmare, but only partly due to NCL. First, we arrived approx at 11:00am and they were not processing people yet. There was a problem with customs from a previous group of cruisers who refused to disembark the vessel. This caused a huge delay and a large line-up of unhappy cruisers all the way out the door and down the outside of the terminal. It was insane but no fault of NCL, they were very nice. We waited at least an hour before we got to check in. the second nightmare occurred during check-in. NCL lost our reservation!!!!! We of course had proof of everything because we had all our e-docs printed and luckily our stateroom was still available. It took about 20 minutes for that to get cleared up but the mix up caused all kinds of confusion and hassle later on throughout the cruise (like our excursion reservation being canceled too). Read more