I was a little apprehensive about taking this cruise after reading the reviews on this website, but it was for my honeymoon and my wife has never been to Hawaii. I thought the cruise would be a great way for her to see the most of Hawaii at the lowest cost.
After taking the cruise, we decided that critic demographics would be a nice feature on this site so I'll give mine so you know where I'm coming from with my review. I am male, 30-35, no children, first cruise, and obviously newlywed. We booked our cruise through an agency and found airfare online as a separate purchase. We booked an inside stateroom using NCL's "guarantee" feature and were upgraded to an exterior room on deck 7 with a window.
The embarkation was confusing for us, we made it to the pier with no problems but there were no signs instructing us where to leave luggage and get in line. We just followed the crowd and made it all the way to the security screening before anyone told us that we were supposed to leave our bags at another entrance. The security team was polite and didn't make us wait in line again. We arrived at about 4pm and seemed to miss the rush of people boarding the boat, it took us 45 minutes from the time the shuttle dropped us at the pier to go through the line, run the bags back to the right place, get checked in, pictures taken, and in the ship's lobby. Once there we encountered our only real complaint of the trip. Reading this review and talking to other passengers in line, the recommendation was to make dinner reservations in the specialty restaurants as early as possible. Talking to the crew, we were told several different stories about making the reservations: directly at each restaurant, over the phone, or at the main desk. After trying all three, we then heard that we couldn't book until 6pm so we waited. We then started trying restaurants again and were told the system was down and we could book after 9pm.