My husband & I had cruised w/Norwegian twice before & were very pleased which is the main reason we chose Norwegian again. The price was good & we liked the ports. We were treating my sister & her husband to the cruise & the cost was much reduced if Norwegian chooses your cabins. When I called to make the reservations, I asked if there was anyway we could get our cabins close together. The representative said she would do her best, but it wasn't up to her. We were delighted to have our cabins next to each other & on deck 10 near the aft. Which happens to be our favorite place since we love sitting on the aft deck of deck 12 outside of the main buffet.

The cabins in the Jade & the Jewel were both very nice, but on the Spirit they seemed quite worn, the mattress was old & the tile in the shower needed replacing. (Our steward was kind enough to bring us a foam egg crate mattress to put on top of our lumpy mattress.)The carpet in the cabins and main areas were very worn. The ship's temperature was set way too coof or all four of us in our group. It was always more comfortable outside. The food choices in the main buffet "Raffles Court" was not as good as the other ships & most of the the food was very salty. For dinner they would close off one side of Raffles Court for a specialty restaurant, which made the buffet & the indoor seating area very crowded. The sound in the Stardust Theatre (where the main entertainment was held nightly) was so loud that we had to sit in the back row & even then the base was too loud. It was too bad because the entertainment was good and the sound level lessened the experience. We ended up being a little disappointed with two of the ports, Civitavecchia, Italy, which is the closet port to Rome and Livorno, Italy, which is the closest port to Florence. Rome was over an hour away & Florence was more than an hour & a half away, so they were quite expensive & exhausting trips. We were however, very pleased with the other ports, Dubrovnik Croatia, Kotor Montenegro, Athens Greece, Mykonos Greece, Naples Italy & Toulon France.

We enjoyed our overall cruise, but were somewhat let down after our previous experiences. We will sail on Norwegian again, but probably not the Spirit unless they make some major changes.