We had only previously taken one back to back Boston to Quebec cruise on Norwegian and had found Celebrity and HAL far superior, but POA was a much different experience. We found the ship to be in good condition for it’s age, except for window upkeep. The itinerary and offered excursions were very good. We booked at a time when most were students were in school, so it was uncrowded, and there was no problem doing anything we wanted. This was our eighth trip to the Hawaiian Islands, but first cruise there. We had not been back in decades, when we use to family and couples vacation. We had never gone in middle to late September before and the weather was like in the Summer, not good. We were there 2 weeks and the Tradewinds did not start blowing until the day before we left September 28 th. As a result it was unpleasantly humid. We should have gone beginning in October or during Winter or in early Spring as we had in the past. There was no rain and the ocean was a warm 87 degrees.

The sevice everywhere was very good. We booked the MDR and excursions in each port before embarkation via telephone with helpful NCL staff. This worked well.

We cannot say enough about the excursions ship staff desk. We had a small medical issue which made it necessary to cancel two excursions, one minutes before the first was to depart. We were fully refunded and booked on one of them again the next day. The following day we missed that excursion, and they were able to put us on another leaving in 10 minutes! This was an extremely unusual situation for us and NCL really came through. We were overwhelmed by such service and this unusual experience gave us one more reason to favor ship’s excursions. Previously we had always booked some of each , but with the volcano previously effecting things, we had booked daily excursions with NCL . On previous trips we explored the various islands by car. Read more