Nautica Review

5.0 / 5.0
399 reviews

2 star cruising or less

Review for Asia Cruise on Nautica
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Michael Allen
6-10 Cruises • Age 70s

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Sail Date: Jan 2011
Cabin: Deluxe Ocean View

We recently travelled on a cruise from Singapore to Hong Kong on the Oceania's Cruise Line Ship Nautica. This is a 6 star ship which did not quite live up to the hype.Firstly this ship is strangely a class ship. If you have a cabin on decks 7 and 8 you have butler service and excellent suites and are able to eat in the 2 excellent speciality restaurants almost at will. Also you appear to have identification which is different from the rest and of course you pay the premium. This top level is perhaps just 6 star provided the clients do not use the rest of the ship, the rest is anything but and is far worse than the same sized Ocean Princess and not in the same league as Crystal Cruises. The lower decks get one opportunity at each of the specialty restaurants but the rest of the time you eat in the Grand Dining room or the Tapas restaurant. The food in all is generally good but having said that we both had food poisoning which lasted for nearly a week. I was unable to eat at all for some 3 days and came back 5 pounds lighter. We ate or drank nothing that was not supplied by the ship but I believe the problem was probably from eating out on shore excursions arranged by the ship. I politely talked to the reception as I thought they may wish to check their kitchens because although I suspected the food from the shore excursions (Raffles, Pnom Penn and a luxury restaurant on the Mekong Delta) I could not be certain. I was rung by the Concierge minutes later with the words that nobody else had the problem and we must have licked our fingers whilst out. This was an unfortunate lie as my wife was sitting behind a similar patient in the doctors and we met at least 14 other suffers (all from the same trips) and a crew member had told me that there were many with my problem.

Unfortunately this is a cruise line that is extremely difficult if you want to do your own thing on shore and you have to do the shore excursions. Unfortunately I like to do a mixture with excursions so that I do not have to eat out or go to the obligatory souvenir shops but the choice of landing times and cruise ports make this difficult and mostly impossible. This ship should have landed at Da Nang but landed at a jetty 30 miles from it with only a dirt road to it and absolutely nothing else for miles, in Guangzhou it landed 40 miles from the city in the industrial port and in Hong Kong it landed at the end of the island where there were no taxi's or anything else. With great opportunism the cruise line offered to take people to the airport in a bus at a cost of 107$ each instead of a taxi at 40$ total. It was claimed that the ship was bumped out of the main dock by the Star ferry but the Ocean Princess, Seabourn and Aquarious had no trouble and there was one completely empty cruise dock. Ports seemed to change regularly at the last minute. The cost of excursions was excessive even in the cruise world for trips that included the usual souvenir shop visits.

The young crew are excellent throughout always with a smile and very efficient. Officers and managers often seemed to have a major problem and whilst they worked hard they smiled little and the atmosphere was not good and I guess they were at the end of a long stint although the assistant cruise director and chef were excellent and they did at least say hello without the typical fixed smile through gritted teeth. The Cruise Director was banging on about departure 6 days from the start.

Cabin Review

Deluxe Ocean View

Excellent cabin but unfortunately on this cruise it is essential to have a balcony as it is impossible to get a seat in the shade.

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