Chose NCL for a 7nt spring break cruise with my 2 kids (13 & 10) and a friend's family. We chose a balcony room, and bid $240.00 for a chance to upgrade to a mini suite...we got it. Room and balcony were spacious and clean...cabin steward was fantastic! The ship was clean and modern with lots of interesting things for kids. Mine loved the ropes course and plank above the sea, the water slides, and all the staff and events at the teen club.

Now the downside...The pools are tiny and terribly overcrowded. As a medical professional, I would take a beating before getting into a hot-tub with ten people with neck tattoos and thong bikinis. While food is very good in the "included restaurants", the staff there is newer, overworked and seemed perpetually confused. (No drinks, no refills when we got our own, etc) Eating with the inclusive meal plan allows you entry into 3 specialty restaurants in 7nts. The food and service in these upgraded eateries is fantastic, but drinks aren't included and some require additional payments for food as well...an air of confusion and shell-game trickery accompanies every part of Free-style cruising, leaving you feeling like either a second class citizen, or nickel and dimed to death! Where and when you can and can't drink is equally obfuscated...the kids were charged for virgin drinks at some bars, not at others, a mojto at one bar is free, but at the mojito bar it is $14.00. The sparkling wine in the room is for you, but you must buy the water, and God forbid you touch the not included mini bar! And while cruising used to be a great way to see lots of places while unpacking just once; with NCL it means cruising to company owned ports that offer no flavor of the area in compound-like shopping malls. Getting away to explore on your own is difficult because these ports are so intentionally far away from normal tourist destinations. Plus the ship is perpetually late arriving. making pre-planning with outside companies impossible. Your cruise meal and drink packages are worthless there so don't even ask.

Disembarking 4000 passengers is a nightmare on a good day, but plan on only one functional gangplank with mixed messages on the PA system and you have full blown chaos. We, and many others got off a late(again) arriving ship to find our shore excursion tender had left without us. Sure we got refunds with our wasted day, but really? The final straw for me was a phone message my 4th day at sea. My children had been lured into the big fun of the arcade that encouraged repeated swipes of a room card to keep the action going. "Company Policy" I was told, was to notify the parents once the kids had wracked up OVER $300.00 of game play. Really? You couldn't have spoken to me earlier??? My children wept with shame, and my only consolation was knowing that the sting of poor gambling choices had been learned as adolescents not college students. The spa may have been great for some, but I received a rather ordinary $120.00 massage, and while my hair looked great after they curled it with a flat iron for photo night with the family...the next day when I washed out the hairspray, clumps of my hair came out too. The beautician had burned off the hair in the back of my head using the overheated flatiron with too much product. Read more