My husband and I are frequent cruisers, and our first cruise experiences were with NCL. We always had a great time, but felt as though they liked to "nickel and dime" passengers a bit too much with promotions. Nevertheless, we decided to cruise on the Jewel to the Mexican Riviera and give them another try.

We used an NCL provided bus from LAX to get to the port, as San Pedro (port location) is over a half hr. from the airport. NCL provided an easy bus transport for the best price I could find. Since it was Sunday, traffic was light, too. We made it to the port in good time. That's where things started going south.

We had booked a Penthouse Suite, which includes a lot of bells and whistles, obviously, since any cruise passenger wants to get what they pay for. One of those things is priority boarding and VIP treatment on-board. In fact, whenever we've been in a Suite on NCL in the past, we've always been escorted onto the boat with a Rep.... sometimes even a ship officer. Well, the moment we entered the port, we were "herded" like cattle into a "holding area". We looked around and didn't see any signs for VIP's or Suite Passengers. When we showed the first NCL rep our tickets, we expected to be shown to a VIP area. Nope. The lady very gruffly sent us into a cattle chute with long lines and we waited for a good 20-25 min. until we got to a rep at the desk. Again, we were unimpressed, as he was non-committal and didn't even welcome us with a "hello". Since we were both a little perturbed by that time, I explained that we may have been sent to the wrong line, that we were Suite passengers. Well, his eyebrows finally went up, and he told us to wait where we were. We watched him walk clear across the terminal (huge building, by the way) and we were left standing there, thinking... "He's going to the VIP area, because that's where our key-cards are! We were right. He came back with our cards. Then he sent us over to where he'd gone. Read more