The good - we stayed in a Haven room. As a result we had a private restaurant for breakfast and lunch. Without that, the cruise would have been awful had we been in the battle that occurred each day in the public spaces and the buffet. We also did specialty restaurants each night except one, also saving us. Lastly, we did the drink package, also a good thing. So all in all the cruise was barely OK due to our finessing around the normal cruise experience. Our shore excursions were AMAZING, also salvaging the vacation. The service in the Haven restaurant and the specialty restaurants was fantastic.

The bad - AVOID any Norwegian cruise that allows friends and family to sail free unless you are one of the people that wants to jam 4 people into an inside cabin in a double bed PLUS two bunk beds. That's right - we saw four large people coming out of one room the size of a walk-in closet. Now normally I would not care what the in-room situations are, but those people all want nothing more than to get out of that little room, clogging up all of the public spaces. And then there is chow time. The buffet had less manners and respect from the patrons than the lunch line at a maximum security penitentiary. We noticed one "clan" literally locking down 12 seats across 4 booths for the entire breakfast span of time (5 hours). It appeared they would send 3 people down to hold one table each at around 6:00 a.m.and then all of their free friends and family would shuffle through in shifts. At approximately 2:00 p.m. there was one person still at each of the tables and each was asleep. Yes, asleep. The casino - perhaps it is a nice casino, but as a non smoker I was appalled that they allowed smoking in the casino. A smoker can enjoy the casino by going out for a smoke break. But a non smoker cannot enjoy a casino that looks like it is full of fog due to all of the smoke. HORRIBLE. Going ashore and re-boarding - good luck avoiding a long line. Lastly, be sure you know what your deal is. We had a few questions for the front desk concerning our bill. On two occasions the front desk agent was not aware of the promotion we had booked. If it were not for me knowing, we would have been overcharged.

We are long time Regent Seven Seas cruisers (3 previous to Alaska) and tried to do our 4th Alaska cruise in a manner to save some $$. We had an 800+ sq ft room with two bathrooms and two balconies that was fabulous. The Haven amenities were good. But we would NEVER book Norwegian again if it was a Friends Sail Free cruise and likely would not cruise again even if it was not.