This was our second cruise, and the first a Caribbean one on Holland America was impeccable so we were looking forward to the same in Hawaii.
We arrived to Honolulu the night before, checked into the Ohana Airport hotel (I checked the ratings and many people complained about it, yet we found it clean, staff excellent and a positive experience) The next day we boarded the Pride of Aloha, with no problems, the boarding went well and we went to the Palace restaurant for lunch for a satisfactory lunch. When we got to our room, it was satisfactory, but there was someone's shirt in one of the drawers, the mini-bar was locked (even though we don't usually use the bar), and we found the storage space limited. We found out the drawbacks of freestyle cruising that night in the Palace. The restaurant was 1 hour waiting at 6pm so we went up to the buffet, to what is a fairly low quality fare. After being use to having a regular dining time on the Holland America, where we rather enjoyed hearing about what our table-mates did that day, we had to struggle to figure out when we wanted to go for dinner and had to phone or go to the reservations desk every day. This was to me a real pain to have to worry about this every day to what was suppose to be a relaxing cruise
As for the trip, as the ship was in port for the first 2 days the next day we went on a 'Grand Circle Island' tour by Roberts Hawaii. This was not a NCL tour but I arranged it via cellphone on the ship from a brochure given to us as we entered the lineups. The tour was excellent, a must for the first-time visitor by a very entertaining driver who picked us up outside the ship the morning. That evening we went from Honolulu to Hilo where it rained 20 inches the previous 24 hours, we arriving in a downpour. We reserved a rental car, I thought for sure it will be a disappointment, but everything turned out well. The sky cleared enough to go to volcano site (with an umbrella for the lighter rain) which was the best view of a volcano I've seen. After lunch back on ship we went to the WAIMEA lookout, it was starting to clear and we got some nice pics. After returning the car and back to the ship we went to the Bistro for supper. Very romantic place, but we were very disappointed in the food. It was no better than the regular food, and the main dishes (sole for her , steak for me) were tiny. We visited the other islands, Maui, Kauai, the Big island again (kona), and rented a couple more cars and a couple of tours and again the islands were wonderful.