The Ship:

The Getaway feels like a big ship and it’s a very crowded ship. We were told there were 4,600 (!!) passengers plus 1,600 crew members and it FELT that crowded. What really lent to that was the feeling that you couldn’t find any place quiet to be. There’s no observation lounge where you can go and sit and read or play games. As in, no place to look out the front of the ship as you sail unless you’re a Haven suite user or you pay for the Vibe Beach club. I’ve never been on a ship where you couldn’t see out the front of the ship. There’s the H2O spice deck at the back of the ship that’s child free during the day. The speakers weren’t working properly and when they tried to play music, it was jaunting. They absolutely didn’t need it. Again, no place quiet. When I mentioned to a crew member in dress whites that the music wasn’t necessary and to look at the faces of the people who didn’t want it, he told me if I wanted some place quiet, I could go back to my room. His inflection wasn’t nasty, I think it was a language/cultural barrier, but it was still inappropriate. Couple that with the fact that towards the end of the cruise the outside areas on some of the decks (7,8,15,16) had flying carpenter ants.

Where I feel the Getaway really failed, was the restaurants. For free there was the buffet, which was hit or miss (mostly miss - the food wasn’t always hot and people were touching things with their BARE HANDS), 3 main dining rooms where the food was excellent, O’Sheenans (the food wasn’t as good as the last time I ate at one on an NCL ship), and Shanghai Noodles. The Noodles was the sorest point - we ordered a few things and one of our dishes tasted like DISH SOAP. When we complained to the maitre’d about it, there was a language barrier, I think, because he surely didn’t understand. When we complained to guest services, the gentleman we spoke to looked at us blankly, like he was still waiting for an actual complaint. We ate at one of the pay for dinner restaurants, Moderno, which was good, and skipped the others. We also tried the ‘Taste of India’ buffet for lunch one day at Moderno- it was so awful we abandoned our plates and had lunch at the sit down dining room after. To finish the dish soap incident - the head of Food and Hotel operations sought us out and apologized. For the next 3 days she sent food trays to our room consisting of chocolates, Hors d'oeuvres, a fruit basket, and cheeses. This was a nice and probably expensive gesture, however, after telling us that we were hard to find (since we were out in the ports all day, every day), the items were left mid morning. Remember, they’re perishable, and not refrigerated. The cheeses included a blue cheese that left a stench that stayed for 3 days. I finally had to give the trays to guest service and ask them to please stop leaving things we couldn’t eat. Read more