Norwegian Sun Cruise Review by tylerkirkkelly

We booked the cheapest inside cabin, which cost slightly less then $750 per person, including port fees, taxes and the automatic $12 per day gratuity charged to your shipboard account. According to the cruise broker I used this was supposedly almost a 50% discount, but I noticed that booking with NCL directly on their website was the exact same price. So, either NCL lowered their prices to fill up the ship, or the discount was not real. At any rate, it certainly was cheap.

At this low price, I did not expect anything extraordinary, and I was right. I will rate various services, described below, on a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being poor and 5 being excellent. On the whole, I find this cruise earns a rating of only 2.5.

Food 2.5. I realize that you can’t expect the finest gourmet food, such as you get in the better San Francisco and New York restaurants, on a cruise. But in general, I found this cruise to have the most disappointing food I’ve had on any cruise. I have only cruised before with three other lines, Royal Caribbean, Voyages of Discovery, and Crystal, so I don’t have a lot of dining experiences to compare, but overall I found the food rather dull and lacking in imagination. Some things were enjoyable, but many dishes seemed tasteless, especially a lot of the fish and meat, which was all frozen and not always of the best quality. Sauces often had no real taste. – like, can’t you put a little wine into a seafood linguini dish to spice it up? Why does it have to be so bland? Why is the lobster and scallops tasteless? Salads and fruit were fresh at least and gave the most enjoyment. Desserts were mixed. I enjoyed the freshly baked individual soufflés, for example, while I don’t understand why a lemon tart seemed to have no lemon taste at all. The ice cream was not very good compared to premium ice creams I am used to – again, often tasteless, or with obvious artificial flavoring.

We dined only once in a specialty (cover charge) restaurant, Le Bistro, as I had heard that it was good. It was, although not extraordinary. I had the steak au poivre, a huge piece of beef (twice as much as I could eat) with a somewhat too salty peppercorn sauce. I was not all that impressed, as the meat was obviously frozen and the texture a little mealy. The pate de fois gras served as the first course was from a can. Good, but not great. The frise salad was good. The crepes suzette for desert I enjoyed, although they were prepared in the kitchen, while the menu said it was a flambé desert prepared at the table.

The main dining room makes a pretence at being gourmet. The restaurant is supposedly a member of the French gourmet restaurant society Chaine de Rôtisseurs. Either this organization is a joke, or the cruise line bribed them to get membership!

Also, I personally don’t care for NCL’s “freestyle dining” concept, which means there are no reservations in the restaurant, and to avoid having to wait for a table, you have to get in line about ten to twenty minutes before the dining room opens.

As to dress in the dining room, it seems just about anything goes. I generally prefer casual, but it’s nice to put on a suit once and awhile and feel like you are really dining in a fancy restaurant. They have two so-called “dress up or not” nights, which means you can go formal if you wish, but in reality you can get in with a tee-shirt, jeans, and flip-flops, if you want. Kind of ridiculous.

Service 4.0. I found the cruise staff everywhere on the boat to be very friendly and helpful. No problem there.

Stateroom 4.0. The inside stateroom seemed larger than others I have encountered and nicely designed. It was clean and well maintained by our steward. The only thing I didn’t like was TV set, which was a small, 19 inch, outdated model. Very few channels to watch, too. Only news was CNN and Fox. The cruise information channel also gets a poor rating. It displayed a map of the ship’s position every few minutes, but it was not a very good one and hard to read on such a small TV.

Entertainment 3.0. Some of the evening shows were very good. There were two Broadway type shows and an excellent Mexican mariachi show. A couple of the programs I did not care for and left before the end, but in general they were quite enjoyable. One think I did not appreciate, however, was that in order to get a good seat, you have to come about twenty minutes early and sit through a promotion of lottery tickets that they hope you will buy for $20. This occurred at every show. Also, the music was often too loud and over amplified. They should turn it down a few decibels. I saw some people walk out with their fingers in their ears because of this.

Internet 3.0. The ship has wi fi access points, but no wi fi in the staterooms. There is also an “Internet café” with terminals, if you didn’t bring your own computer. As on all cruise ships, Internet access is expensive. The cheapest plan was 250 minutes for $100, or 40 cents a minute. This was expected. However, the Internet access was frequently down – more it seemed than my usual experience on a cruise ship. It seemed there were a lot of complaints from other passengers about this.

Shore Excursions 4.0. We took several shore excursions, including a visit to Los Mochis and the colonial city of El Fuerte, and two excursions to the Sierra Madre mountains. There is a wide variety of excursions available, and the tour operators chosen by NCL seem reliable and the guides friendly and speak very good English. I think most passengers were probably quite satisfied with their shore excursions. I did hear a couple of complaints about the Copper Canyon train tour, which we decided not to take because it was very expensive ($425) and lasted 18 hours – it starts at 5:30 a.m. and returns at midnight. This tour is heavily advertised as the highlight of the cruise. Could be, but some people were apparently disappointed because it was too heavily booked, which necessitated having two different tour groups, with a lot of delays. I heard one passenger complain that her group only got 15 minutes to eat lunch at the hotel at the canyon, because of the delays.

So, and in all, I would rate this cruise about a 2.5 or 3. There were some pluses, but a number of minuses, too.