Spitsbergen Review
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Until I watched Hurtigruten's webinar on the their winter cruises as a way to see an aurora, i didn't think it would be a good way to see the aurora. My impression of the Norwegian coast in the fall was cold and rainy -- and it was. In the webinar Hurtigruten hyped their aurora alert system and said that for cruises 11 days or longer you would get a free 7 day cruise if there were no aurora alerts on your cruise.
When we decided to take the 11 night cruise, the aurora guarantee was not available on our sailing. We decided to go anyway recognizing that since 40% of the sailing was north of the Arctic Circle, that we would be in darkness for much of the cruise during the first two weeks of December. However, I thought that the long periods of darkness would increase our chances of seeing an aurora. Wrong. Not once during our 11-nights on the cruise was the aurora alert system activated in the cabins.
The big disappointment was that the portion of the cruise that would have been spent in the high Arctic north of Tromso was cancelled with no compensation. Initially, we were told that we would receive some compensation, but that it would depend on how we purchased the cruise. At the end of the cruise, we were told that Hurtigruten was "generously" offering a 25% discount on a future cruise to be taken within a year, but that the 5% past-passenger discount could not be added to the discount.
Cabin Review
We went with a large inside cabin, because the outside cabins looked very small. We had lots of floor space. The temperature control in our cabin did not work well. We had it set on the minimum and it was still much hotter than we liked. The bathroom was a good size, but a floor glue problem meant that it had a background odor as if someone had puked. (The cruise director humorously described the smell as a Portuguese ghost since the ship had been finished in a Portuguese shipyard.)