This was our 5th cruise on Norwegian (7th total) 1st on the Escape so we thought we knew what to expect when it came to NCL. How wrong we were! It started out well as the boarding process was pretty quick. We chose to board between 10:30-11:00 and because we had the benefit of Casino at Seas we bypassed the longest of the lines waiting for the security check. That’s a nice perk I will admit! We boarded the ship and it was exactly what we expected, same layout as the Breakaway/Getaway. We liked the addition of the big screen TV’s by pool and the kids’ pool and play area was much nicer on the Escape we noticed although we don’t have young kids anymore. It was just something we took notice of. That said we wished the kids STAYED in it! There is a full size kids/family pool and an adult pool and hot tub area. With the ridiculous amount of people on the Escape it is a necessity to keep kids out of the adult only pool and hot tubs! There wasn’t a time on our 7 day cruise you could get in either of the two hot tubs without being overrun by young children. They were using the hot tubs as heated swimming pools, ugh. Jumping, swimming and splashing everyone! We were completely frustrated. The staff did nothing!!! But they were quick to remove towels and other belongings from chairs if you left them for more than an hour. So if there were only 2 of you better not go in the pool and then decide to grab something to eat without letting them see you go back to your chairs or your stuff would be removed! We even spoke to some people who had items removed and then the items were “lost”. They should spend more time enforcing their pool rules than being chair nazis! If you wake up early enough to save chairs who is anyone to tell you that you can’t have them? Ridiculous! Now onto service or lack there of. Our room steward was adequate. He did just enough for me to say he did his job, our room was clean. He didn’t take the time to know or call us by name. He didn’t introduce himself ever. If I didn’t look on the TV I would never have known his name. The bartenders and servers were overrun and couldn’t keep up with the amount of passengers at all. If you were sitting at a table or chairs by the upper bar in the pool area forget it you weren’t ever going get a drink. Tables were never wiped down unless you went to the bar and requested someone come and wiped them. In the specialty restaurants, we ate at 4 of them, Bayamo/Tepanyaki/Cagney’s/The Italian Restaurant, the service was ok. Bayamo was definitely the best of the four as far as service and food. Don’t worry about dress code as far as needing a collared shirt or anything though because AGAIN rules are NOT enforced! We got dressed up each time only to be seated next to someone in cut-offs and a tank top literally every night. We went to add on a second evening at Bayamo and the woman at reservations said to my husband (we were coming from the pool) “You know you can’t dress like that.” My pool cover up appears to be a dressy dress so I guess she thought we were “dressed”. My husband was wearing dressy shorts and nice T-shirt, no printing or anything on it. I thought I was going to go over the desk at her with the tone of voice she used and after seeing with our own two eyes what we had been seated next to all the other nights. I basically told her she obviously had never walked into any of the restaurants to see first hand what they were allowing and that we had in fact dressed up every night only to be disgusted by what was surrounding us. I told her never mind on the additional reservation we no longer wanted to go because what she said and the tone of her voice was rude. We then move on to the hundreds of dollars of “errors” that all of sudden started to happen on our on board account, it was a $400 swing in our favor by the time all the fighting between us and NCL was said and done. It took 4 initial trips and passing the buck to other people to finally get to a woman to would take the time to try to deal with the issue. Of course we had to add it up and explain it to her multiple times before she understood what was going on, had to raise my voice for the world to hear and threaten to take back the $500 Cruise next deposit before all of sudden “Ohhhh now I see the problem.” (45 minutes later of arguing) Of course no sooner did she “fix” the problem did we have a credit and charge go through incorrectly again, ugh. We were back down at her desk again quite literally within 1/2 hour. Major problems in this area!!!!! Watch your onboard account like a hawk, I can’t stress this enough. The stress of this ruined our trip with the running back and forth over multiple days and wasted hours to get it straightened out.

Bermuda itself is beautiful! We call it our happy place. Thank goodness we had great experiences off the ship at Snorkel Bay Beach, the bartenders there are really fun, lol. The beach is small but it’s close and there are plenty of fish to make it worth while. We went to Hamilton via ferry for Harbor Nights which is always a fun time. Second day we took the Rising Son catamaran excursion. The crew is fantastic! This trip is great whether you’re into snorkeling or not. My husband was able to snorkel and I was able to swim to the little beach area and collect tons of colorful sea glass. Day three we went to Horseshoe Bay beach. Sush a beautiful area! Make sure you check out the small cove area to the right of the main beach, that’s where there are tons of fish to see. The people of Bermuda are friendly and laid back, you couldn’t find a nicer place to be imo. The two and half days there saved the trip for us because our actual time on the ship was for the most part awful.

Lastly I will say I enjoyed the two shows we saw, After Midnight and The Brat Pack for entertainment value. The After Midnight cast gets highest marks for being professional on and off stage. The Brat Pack cast however does not. They unfortunately lived up to the name of their show. While wearing their crew tags two of the cast entered an elevator with us. By what role they played, The Nerd and The Princess; they proceeded to through out F Bombs and openly complain about how passengers on the ship were a “pain in their F-ing A$$” their words, not mine. I’m just quoting what we actually had to listen to! Totally unacceptable. This happened the day before we were disembarking and we were so disgusted with our experience on The Escape at this point we just went back to our room, packed and waited to Escape the Escape! This was the first cruise I was excited to get off the ship, the only reason I give it 2 Stars is because 1-It’s Bermuda, 2-The Excursions in Bermuda were good.