We loved cruising Alaska a few years ago on the Norwegian Star and wanted to go back again on NCL's newest ship.

This ship was absolutely beautiful and offered lots of things to do for our various age groups in our party. The Savor/Taste dining rooms offered wonderful meals that didn't seem redundant and no one had any complaints of meals served except for one snafu at breakfast which was remedied pretty quickly. The reservation system for the specialty restaurants and shows was not user friendly and unfortunately a lot of other cruisers would book multiple reservations and take up the space so that others couldn't get a reservation. I'm hoping that NCL will do something with the software that will prevent the same group to book several restaurants for the same night and then of course just go to one of them. We tried walking into two restaurants where there were plenty of tables open but they were unable to even seat two of us because of reservations that no one showed up to. They have a policy of holding for 30 minutes after the reservation. We were able to eat at Ocean Blue and that was fantastic as well as the Sushi restaurant which we found out was not part of the upgrade package but the food was very tasty.

The observation lounge is amazing! It was unfortunate that some cruisers thought it was their own personal sleeping lounge and also it was very sad to see how some people would leave their plates/glasses and leftover food just sitting on the furniture. I think NCL will have their work cut out for them keeping it as beautiful as it was on the first day. We had a mid-ship balcony room and boy have they gotten smaller!! There is considerably less storage and it's definitely a dance to get past each other in the room. The non-smoking casino was fun, my Mom and Aunt really had fun playing the penny slots and it has the fastest bar service if you're in need of a drink. The race track looked like fun, a few of our party were able to get a reservation for that and they had a good time. Kind of a once and done thing though. The slides were fun to watch and again a few of our party enjoyed them on the warmer days. The show Jersey Boys is a must! The reservations were another stickler but we were all finally able to see the show few of us on one night and a few on another. Actually all the shows were great, from our group someone saw each one of them and all gave good reviews. There is an adult area with a hot tub and lounge on the aft deck which was nice but some still tried to bring along their children. I went to the buffet twice, it's not really my thing but it offered many varieties and everyone seemed to enjoy it. Please stop at the mojito bar and let the "chocolate cowboy" (check out his face book page) make you a drink. He's a great bartender and has the gift of gab with everyone. We did get a couple's massage which was nice and although I thought the automatic gratuity a little excessive it was a very nice spa. The put-put game behind the race track is fun although a little awkward to get to since the starting area is near the "haven" entrance only so you have to walk through the course to get to the start. The shops are pretty small and offer the standard items wasn't really wowed by anything. The photo shop needs more staff, we always had at least a 10-15 minute wait even though they have all these computers that you can log into to order your prints. Our group did several cruise excursions and they were very nice and provided good information about the areas we visited. We did private tours in Skagway and Ketchikan that were a lot of fun also. Our cabin service was okay, again I think they need more staff for such a large ship. Others in our group had fantastic service some had just okay service. We had a mixture of cabins from deck 10/12 and 15 inside, window, balcony and mini suite. All were decorated very nice and except for window cabin (12700) everyone thought they were much smaller than other ships. So pack efficiently! We were very fortunate to have perfect sunny weather everyday so all those cold weather clothes stayed in the luggage under the bed.