Norwegian Gem Review
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My husband and I along with our two sons, ages 27 and 22 cruised on the Gem, May 27 to June 3, 2017. We have done this itinerary to Florida and the Bahamas before. We are not thrilled with this itinerary but we love sailing on the Gem. This was the first time I booked three weeks out as a “last minute” cruise.
Embarkation - We arrived at the pier at 10 am and went through security within 20 minutes. This was the longest we have ever waited to check in. I don’t know if they didn’t have enough people to check passengers in but we waited over an hour on line. Many people talked about how long they had to wait to check in, some people said they had to wait on line for 2 hours. When we finally did check in there was a problem with one of my son’s key cards. They didn’t have his key card but had the passenger from the previous cruise. This is the second year in a row we had a problem with key cards. Last year they had some random guy in our cabin with us. Lucky for us that we received boarding number 7 so once the key card problem was resolved we waited about 8 minutes before we boarded the beautiful Gem.
Cabin -We always book a balcony cabin but there were none available so I booked two ocean view cabins on deck 5. I honestly have to say that it was not a bad experience being in the ocean view and definitely would book again. At times we missed the balcony but we were hardly ever in our cabin so it would have been a waste of money had we booked a balcony. The cabin had plenty of room, ours had a third bed but we did not need that. We did pull it down to see what it looked like and there is no way that any of us could sleep in it. Our cabin was kept clean but this was the first time on a cruise that we didn’t meet our room steward till almost the end of the cruise. Every morning around 1am until 6am we heard banging noises coming from outside the window. Never did find out what that noise was, and no it was not the hangers. In our son’s cabin the air conditioning did not work as well as the air in our cabin. Maintenance checked it out and said there was nothing they could do to get it to blow cooler air. We adapted to these minor problems.