My husband, 6 year old daughter, Mother and I cruise once or twice every year. We primarily cruise Royal Caribbean and Disney Cruise lines and prefer the Caribbean and Hawaii itineraries. We enjoy the level of service we receive on RCL and love the children's programs on DCL. NCL has a mixed reputation for their different ships which we can attest to. I will say that our experience on the Pearl was wonderful and thought their level of service came very close to RCL. This past March we sailed Hawaii on NCL's Pride of America. The itinerary was absolutely amazing as we love Hawaii and a cruise is a fantastic way to see the islands. The Pride of America, however, lived down to its reputation of poor service, bad food and an inexperienced crew. We decided to give NCL another try and booked the Pearl for the beautiful Southern Caribbean itinerary. We were very pleasantly surprised with this beautiful ship!

We live in Florida so drove to the Port of Miami and parked in the parking garage - don't forget to be prepared to pre-pay for your stay. We arrived at the port at 12:30PM and embarked without any glitches. We were able to go right to our cabin and get settled. We went to the spa and had a look around as well as the fitness room. Both are nice size facilities. We were able to go to the kid's club starting at 3:00PM and signed up our 6 year old daughter. This ship does not require the children to wear ID bracelets with their cabin number and muster stations listed on them. The kids' club also does not issue pagers or cell phones for parent contact. I guess we are more familiar with Disney and Royal Caribbean who offer you the comfort of knowing if your child is unhappy they will contact you. Our daughter did well and really enjoyed the program but with no way for her to contact us through the program staff, I was compelled to check in on her often to be sure she was doing OK.

Every crew member we encountered was very nice. Everyone said "Hello" and had a smile on their face. It made for a very pleasant cruise. The two sailings prior to ours were affected by the Norovirus so extra precautions needed to be taken to hopefully prevent another outbreak. Crew members needed to ask everyone to sanitize their hands, the buffet was served by crew members, we needed to be sanitized again prior to re-boarding the ship in each port - guests were cranky because of these extra precautions but the crew members we encountered smiled right through it. We, fortunately, did not have any customer service problems this cruise but saw others who did. The crew handled them beautifully. We watched an elderly woman who was having trouble finding a deck chair and had a crew member following her around dragging a chair behind him until she found just the right spot to place it. He smiled the entire time. Read more