First I want to say that we have cruised seven times in the past, once prior with Norwegian and absolutely loved every moment of cruising. This time we cruised with a group of 8 people, two couples both with teenage children on the 23rd of March sailing aboard the Norwegian Jewel. The ship itself was beautiful and extremely clean.

Unfortunately, I think NCL blew it this time big time. As I stated, we cruised NCl before on the Norwegian Dawn and had the time of our lives. We are simple, easy to please people and like to have fun. We began our cruise by flying into Fort Lauderdale and taking a car service to the Port of Miami. We were able to quickly find a porter to take our luggage and the wait time to board the ship was approximately 1 hour and 15 minutes. Check in was what we expected and our cabins were ready and waiting for us by 1:00.

We soon learned that the on shore excursions we booked on-line were not showing up on their end and they did not have tickets for us for the excursions we chose. We then had to wait in a very long line to obtain shore excursion tickets (couldn't book them on the tv in the cabin as you can on other cruises). Dinner the first night was great - food was very good and several choices to choose from. I have to say though that the wait staff all seemed tired and not too eager to please (again unlike prior cruises where staff was very friendly). The remaining nights at Dinner turned into a nightmare. I don;t understand their new version of freestyle cruising as you need to make dinner reservations even in their main dining rooms,. This was not the case on our prior NCL cruise. Even with reservations, we sometimes had to wait 20 minutes or more, or have our group split between two tables (what made it more frustrating was that the dining room was never filled so we didn't understand the wait time or being split apart). Read more