Lovely ship but beauty is only skin deep. We have recently returned from a seven day cruise on Norwegian Epic. It was our silver anniversary and wanted this to be a special holiday, however it was very disappointing. This holiday was expensive and was advertised as all inclusive, but we found this to be false. There were 20 restaurants on the Norwegian Epic but only five of them were in fact complimentary, the rest involved paying an extra fee to dine. The five that were available to dine in did have good food, but were very limited in terms of variety and seemed to repeat the same menu almost on a daily basis, as if they were encouraging you to spend more money in their non-complimentary restaurants.

Another major disappointment was the lack of a decent swimming pool on the ship. There was an aqua flume on the ship but their idea of a swimming pool was a 4ft 7in deep tiny pool which most of the time was full of children. There was therefore nowhere to have a decent swim such as you would receive in even the cheapest package holiday.

Gratuities - We paid the gratuities before embarking on the holiday on the understanding that that would avoid us having to tip on the cruise. However this too turned out to be inaccurate as every time we bought drinks at dinner or anywhere there was a waiter service gratuities were added onto the bill We also received information in our cabin encouraging us to tip staff which we had already pre arranged and paid for. Read more