My husband and I just returned from the 8/15 sailing on Pride of Aloha. I had tried to cancel the cruise after reading the comments at this site but was unable to do so without losing our money. So, we did go into this cruise prepared for it's shortcomings and it helped us avoid a lot of the anger we seemed to witness from other passengers. We had cruised once before, 15 years ago on the Royal Caribbean, and this is what I have to compare this cruise to. While the cruise had many problems I can honestly say that we enjoyed our cruise and my biggest disappointment was in the passengers themselves.

The amount of complaining and arguing and anger displayed made it embarrassing to be a part of the cruise. I am talking about the passengers behavior not the staff. Two families were kicked off the cruise when the father's got in a fist fight at the pool. One man was caught stealing a piece of art work. When an area was blocked off for a short time due to a chemical spill passengers had to be threatened with security being called in because they just moved the barricades and attempted to get in the area anyway. While I understand the frustration of paying a lot of money and not having top of the line service, I was amazed how many people seemed to let the problems with the ship destroy their entire vacation. We did not receive the pampering that we had on our previous vacation but then again, this cruise has an American staff and how many Americans are raised to kiss butt to people no matter how bad they are being treated? We continually saw staff being yelled at in situations that were totally beyond their control.

We stayed 3 nights prior to the cruise at the Aston Beach Hotel. The Marriott was next door and we went to the NCL office at the Marriott to get some questions answered. That is when we found out that the people staying at the Marriott could pre-register to board. The lady in the office was polite enough to pre-register us since we stood in the line there. This was great. When we arrived at the ship there were long lines to board but the people pre-registered had a separate, very short, line and were on the ship in about 15 minutes. The Aston was cheaper than the Marriott so we got lucky. I would highly recommend staying prior at the Marriott just for the pre-boarding benefits. (or, if you are at a hotel close to the Marriott to go over to their office and bring all your paperwork and ID and try to pre-register with them and hopefully you will get lucky like we did). Read more