Norwegian Jade Review
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This is a nice, well maintained ship. Oddly, considering the ports it serves, it's décor is aggressively Hawaiian-themed throughout. We have cruised several times on other lines, but this was our first cruise on NCL. We had initial doubts about the "Freestyle dining", but we were pleasantly surprised to find that we never had a wait of more than five minutes at either of the main dining rooms. That was not the case with the "complementary" Jasmine Asian Café. That room seemed to be inefficiently managed and the hostess was not in a good mood (an exception to the uniformly excellent attitudes of the ship's crew and staff) either time we ate dinner there. We and another couple with whom we were traveling had a 15 minute wait the first time, and about a 30 minute wait the second time, even though there were several empty tables both times. (The complimentary dining venues did not take reservations.) Both of these times and throughout the cruise, we got to the dining rooms at about 7 PM. Generally that worked well, since the first stage production in the big theater happened at 7:30 PM each night, and the early dining crowd were mostly finishing about that time. The menu choices were O.K. but again, nothing special. More than half the time, our dinners arrived lukewarm at best.
As noted above, the ship's crew and staff were very helpful and pleasant throughout the cruise. It would have been nice if the men and women who were tasked with speaking to large groups of passengers could have been more proficient in the English language, given the preponderance of English-speaking passengers on the ship, but that wasn't a big problem.
The ports didn't offer much to see, other than the usual tourist shops. We are both in our 70's, and the excursions seemed to mostly involve more walking than we could handle. We enjoyed the Mayan ruins in Mexico, and we would have participated in the "beach party", except that the ship would have tendered us to the beach, and we would have had to get up and around by about 5:45 AM that morning to have breakfast and catch the only tenders that would get us to the beach. That seemed to work against a relaxing day, so we skipped it.