This was the 5th cruise for my husband and me. We have been on Royal Caribbean twice, Carnival once and Princess once. Since we wanted a 7 day cruise and wanted to go out of New Orleans, NCL was our only choice of cruise lines to use (all others were only 5 days). Also, we had never been to Honduras, Guatemala or Belize City. It was our 4th time to visit Cozumel.

Embarkation was the easiest we had ever encountered. We parked in the Julia Street Terminal (Erato Parking Garage) and went straight to the NCL check in desk. We had to wait approximately 2 hours in the terminal before boarding the Spirit. Once on board, it was quite easy to learn our way around the ship. We ate the Raffles buffet for lunch (food was so-so). We chose the formal dining rooms for dinner each night and found the food to be not quite up to par of what we were used to on the other cruise lines. The wait staff was friendly, but quite slow in serving our table. Each night we were able to get a table for 2. We heard from other passengers that the food in the dining rooms where you had to pay the extra charge was much better. We found the food portions to be quite small. We thought the cheeseburgers were very tasty.

There was an outbreak of the GI virus on the ship the first couple of days, so extreme precautions were taken by the cruise line, especially in the buffet area. All food was served by the staff and all passengers were encouraged over and over the importance of hand sanitizing. We were lucky that we were not affected by the virus, but those who were affected were quite miserable. Read more