Just got back from a week on the Epic and can say with no hesitation that we'll never go through that again. Norwegian had us 'select' when we wanted to check in so we selected 930 to 10 AM. We arrived at 950 due to cabs being swamped in own and there was a long line by the door. I finally found the one person from Norwegian and was told to go to the back of the line. The doors finally opened at 1020 just to get into the building. We start the rat maze line to get to security where we stood for 45-50 minutes while nothing happened. No info on why we'd been in line already for almost an hour. They had to bring out chairs for older passengers because they were starting to get shaky from standing so long. When they finally opened the security checkpoint they had two whole lanes open while the other two lanes checked people in wheelchairs. Go through security and upstairs to check in with Norwegian. It got worse. We stood in line another 45-50 minutes while Norwegian fought with what we were told was a new computer system. Two people working the desk while supervisors leaned over them helping them navigate the system. After taking our photos 3 times ( because the system wasn't grabbing the photos) we finally finished checking in. One hour and 50 minutes standing in line for what is usually a 15 to 20 minute process! They finally let us board the ship and discover the computer system had put my wife's photo on my card so now I have to go down to deck 5 to Guest Services to fix that. Turns out quite a few of us had the same problem. We were supposed to leave at 4pmbut at 510 pm they were still loading luggage onto the ship. We never heard the reason for the long delay although we suspect their new computer system.

It was three days before we knew who our room steward was. It was impossible to contact him. You'd ring his number and got a recording that he was busy and call back, then it hung up. Never was able to reach him on the phone the entire week. The room was bad. Imagine your toilet 4 feet from the head of your bed. In a frosted glass room, that becomes an echo chamber just inside the room entryway. On the other side of the entryway is the shower. Then on the 'desk' was a small sink. My camper has a bigger sink. It's not possible for two people to move about the room at the same time. The foot of the bed is about 16 inches from the desk so if someone is sitting on the bed using the mirror, you have to crawl over the bed to get any further into the cabin. The lighting was so inadequate that we had to use flashlights at night to look into the safe or drawers or the second closet.

Elevators: on both ends of the passenger areas, so if you're in the middle of the ship it's a long walk to anywhere. Plus on one set of elevators it stops at the 6th floor. I you need to go to the fifth floor where dining rooms are, you walk forward through the casino to take an escalator down to five then walk back to the dining areas. There's not a single umbrella on the ship so you either sit in the sun all day or try and grab a deck chair under the shade somewhere. The pool area was fine but most of the deck area seemed as if they built the ship then stuck passenger areas in whatever space was left. One section near the back we named the prison yard because that's what it looked like. Tall plain walls, an overhead and the railing. An open box where they stuffed deck chairs. There is an narrow open area that cuts through part of the ship so they stuck a children's play yard under it. The guy that designed the ship would be better off designing freighters. Read more