As a little background, this is my 4th cruise, but first with Norwegian (and surely last). I have done 2 Carnival and 1 Royal Caribbean.

Our group of 18 couldn't wait for the big family cruise to celebrate my grandparent's 50th anniversary, all of the kids, their spouses, grandkids, and our spouses went. We put an unbelievable amount of planning into this vacation in order to make it extra special for them; wow were we disappointed!

We had no problems embarking, it was a rather speedy process and the people at the counter were very nice and helpful. We got on the ship and went strait the reservation desk to make dinner reservations at the Hibachi grill. The ladies there were rather snooty, not overly willing to help, and we even got a few rolling eyes. We booked, brushed it off, and hurried off to our rooms. When we got there, I was quite upset. We had specifically requested that 7/8 of our rooms be arranged into queen beds, as we were all couples. We had 2 twin beds, but that wasn't the worst part, there was dry urine on my toilet seat, which was quite a shocker. And of course, no room steward could be found. We also had 3 lights that didn't work, the 1 outlet we had did not work, and the phone didn't work (so we couldn't call anyone to fix any of these problems). My cousin and his wife were staying next door to us, and they had dirty sheets (also 2 twin beds instead of the queen). So we went down to the desk to let them know, then off to lunch. We ran into our grandparents and they told us to join them at Windows (one of the sit down restaurants) because they had reservations. When we showed up, some of the group was there, so we sat at the table next to them. There were only 10-12 other parties seated in this massive dining room, but the waiter was less than thrilled that the party of 8 had turned into a party of 12 (and he showed it well). We were brushed off, which wouldn't have been too bad if the food was decent, but that didn't happen. We also spoke with the maitre' De to try to make reservations (freestyle cruising SUCKS by the way) for our party of 18 to eat together, because that was the whole point of the cruise. We were told that they couldn't push 2 tables together, so we would be a table of 10 and a table of 8 seated close to each other. Gee thanks. We again brushed it off, and started exploring the boat. Read more