My Husband and I have been on a few different cruises together: Carnival, Princess and we just took an Alaskan cruise with Celebrity last Summer. This was our first experience with Norwegian and we decided to take all 6 of our kids (ages 5 - 17) on their first cruise because we found such a great deal going on during this time.

Embarkation: Norwegian asked us to arrive at 9:30. We arrived and ended up waiting outside the building until 10:30. Once we were allowed in, the process of checking in was smooth. The complaint I have here is that they asked us which individuals out of our family of 8 did we want to have access for purchases with their key card. Naturally my husband and I only wanted ourselves. However, 6 hours, 4 kids in the arcade, and $140 later we discovered that telling the check in people doesn't matter for squat. Once you board, you have to let the front desk know as well. Not sure why they even ask you at check in since it doesn't even matter! Anyway, after checking in, we had to wait probably another hour or so before we could board, which made it about noon before we got on board. My kids wanted to go to the buffet which was, of course, very crowded but the food was good. We got all our kids registered in the Splash Academy (3-12) and Entourage (teen) clubs. By then our rooms were already ready for us around 1:30, which we found impressive! Luggage followed soon after (around 2:30). My 5 year old, 7 year old, and 9 year old all LOVED the splash academy. If they had it their way, they would go there all day every day but we usually just had them go in the evening so we could spend time with them throughout the day. The staff at the Splash academy was amazing and did a great job keeping the kids entertained. They even had a carnival that the kids put on for the passengers in the theater on the last day of the cruise. However, my 12 year old very much disliked it. She went only the first 2 days, made a friend who was also 12 and disliked it as much as she did, and those two hung out outside of the club throughout the week. She just felt she was too old for it and would have rather been able to go to the teen club. My teens did enjoy Entourage (teen club). They made a lot of friends there (it was fall break for a lot of states so there were a lot of kids on our cruise) and would hang out with them a lot both inside the club (there were staff members always present at the club who were young and interacted with them) and outside of it (since they could check themselves in and out of the club). This was nice for my husband and I because we thought we would get NO time together and, surprisingly, we did!

Right after boarding, we tried to download the app that Norwegian has for on board passengers. My husbands worked but mine did not. We has the front desk help us and they couldn't get it to work for me either so they credited both mine and my husbands account for that sine the primary reason for us purchasing it was so we could communicate with each other during the cruise. If mine wouldn't work, there wasn't any point for him to have his. Read more