I titled this review "Yes seems to be the easiest word" in honor of Sir Elton John's "Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word" because the wait staff on the Jade seemed to say 'No' a lot. The wait staff on the Jade seemed to be very focused on following their processes and not so much on customer service. For example, if you asked for any modification to an entree (i.e. Can you leave off the mashed potatoes from the entree?), they would say No. "Can I have iced tea without the lemon?" - No - perhaps I am going too far with this illustration.

There is also a lot of upselling once you get on the boat. I understand they need to do this because they discount the base price of the cruise so much that they need to make it up with upsell dinners, art auctions, and pilates classes, etc... There is quite the plethora of methods to spend money once you get on the boat from the traditional alcoholic drinks to spa treatments to specialty restaurants to laundry services. There are no coin-op laundry facilities on this boat so you either have to wait for the $24.95 laundry special if you are budget conscious like us.

NCL also seems to like to use fear tactics in order to get passengers to book excursions with NCL such as, "When disembarking from Barcelona, there will be a limited number of taxis and the taxi will charge you over $40 per person, so you should arrange transportation with NCL at $40 per person" - Totally incorrect - There were a plethora of taxis when we disembarked off the ship and we paid 37,50 Euros for 2 people with 4 bags to get to the Barcelona airport. Or "The walk from the port in Italy to the train station is 20 minutes so you should book our excursion instead." - I must walk fast because it only took me 5 minutes to walk from the port to the train station. Read more