We booked our family of 12 on the NCL Getaway's New Years' week cruise 10.5 months in advance. The ship offered so much fun for our six grandchildren ages 7-17 with its 5 water slides and ropes course that we knew it was the best choice for us. The excursions were well planned out and so much fun. We swam with dolphins in St. Maarten, snorkeled at Coki Beach in St. Thomas and had thrills and chills on the Atlantis Aquaventure in Nassau. Our five cabins were all together on Deck 14, a short distance from the Garden Cafe where we ate breakfast every day. The water park and ropes course were a joy during our 3 days at sea.

The only negative on this cruise was regarding Dining; dinner to be more specific. My husband and I have traveled on ships with Freestyle Dining before. We even took a cruise on the Norwegian Dawn. We always found the food in the main (include) dining rooms to be great and we went to a specialty restaurant once just for variety.This was not the case on this cruise. The main dining room food was substandard and the service was very slow. Granted the slow service may have had something to do with us having a party of 12; but dinner taking almost 3 hours one evening was ridiculously long. We did not realize going into this cruise that the quality of the meals served in the specialty restaurants was FAR superior to the Tropicana main dining room. This is ONE reason we were disappointed with the dining. The other problem we encountered was in regard to reservations for the 3 specialty restaurants we had been given vouchers for from our travel agent. Unless you are paying for your specialty reservations (and not receiving vouchers), you CANNOT make reservations 90 days in advance and must make them once you are onboard. Finding out that most nights were either already sold out or only available at inconvenient times like 5:45 or 10:00, made what should have been a pleasure into a very stressful situation. In hindsight, the way this could have been avoided would be to have purchased the Ultimate Dining Plan at $119.00 per person. Even though it would have cost us about $1200.00 more, we could have eaten at all the specialty restaurants we wanted at whatever time was best for us. We would not have had to endure the substandard food and slow service in the Tropicana Restaurant and most of all, the stress of the difficult time making reservations when we first came onboard and were ready to enjoy the cruise we waited so long for.

I only pass on this information to inform others who may be planning their dream vacation so they may have an even better cruise experience than we did. Everything else was fabulous. For kids 7-17 there can't be a more fun ship than the NCL Getaway.