We decided to give Norwegian a try after several Princess cruises, a Carnival and a Royal Caribbean Cruise.

Our trip started out by one of our bags not being delivered to the room and the other bag having the 2 bottles of wine removed (no note, nothing before hand explaining the "Corking fee policy") I went down to the service desk, and they sent me to the "Penny Pincher" area....Where I was promptly charged 15.00 per bottle of wine and received my bag. That began a series of unpleasant occurrences.... The second night on the ship, we discovered a bat crawling on our balcony.... which then promptly flew into our cabin. I get that the crew can't control nature and a bat flying into the cabin wasn't the problem, it was that after calling two times to have someone come up and remove the bat, which had crawled behind shelving, we were told that the head of housekeeping was in a meeting. 30 minutes later we enlisted the assistance of two housekeeping crew members who were passing by our cabin and who promptly removed the bat. (Bravo to the house keepers!)

The next 3 nights were followed up with a neighboring balcony's drain backing up. The noises sounded like many toilets backing up and the black water that spewed out of the drain quickly spread down the row of balcony's leaving behind black tarry, sticky substance ( I don't think I want to know its origin)! Our first call about it was at 6am after a sleepless night of the noise. We were told by the service desk that it was because of the rain and normal. They sent a crew member up with a towel to clean it up.... Now that was just funny. There was far too much water and goo for a towel. The next call happened the next morning, There was more black water spewing from the drain. This time we were told that they clean deck 12 at 1am, and it was water from that running down the pipes. Air was in the pipes and pushed the water back up onto the balcony. The next day, I took video and went down to the service desk to show them the dark water coming up the drain and flowing onto the balconies. The front desk supervisor was good. She called maintenance, had them up in our room and on the balcony snaking the drain. They got a huge chuck of something out... closed it back up, cleaned up the balcony and apologized. The front desk supervisor gave us dinner at the steak house. The next morning.... surprise! There was more gurgling (although not as much or as loud) and more black crap on the balcony. We waved the white flag and gave up. Out of the 7 days, I think we were able to use our balcony 2 times without black gross stuff accompanying us. The customer service on the boat was fair at best, with the exception of our steward. He was very good and was tipped accordingly! Read more