I have traveled at least a dozen cruises, but this was my first experience on NCL. We decided on NCL for their "freestyle cruising." I'm a little tired of the formal nights and was interested in something a bit more fun and informal.
We traveled on Christmas ~ not the best time to travel since there were so many issues with plane cancellations, lost luggage and jammed airports this year. Since we bought the NCL flight arrangements, they made sure that we had the cheapest flights available. They were complete with a Delta flight that took us to Atlanta with a 55 minute layover. However, our first flight left an hour late and our arrival and departure gates were the furthest apart on different concourses. It made our connection time a whole three minutes. We made the flight since I ran at full speed and made them hold the plane. But, of course our bags did not make the connection. I've traveled enough to pack clothes for this, but others in my group didn't. My husband's bag never did make the ship even though mine showed up at the first port. The NCL Sun had a very lovely woman name Carolyn in the front office trying to help us. However, we found out more by calling our platinum American Express phone number. They were able to give us a full tracking of the location of our bag, where Delta and NCL could not. My lessons learned were:
1. Insist upon direct flights. 2. Go the day before ~ we've done it many other times before and it makes that first day so much more enjoyable. 3. A cruise on a major holiday is not fun. Leave it to others.