This was my wife and my 26th cruise; our 5th on NCL (although they only show us as our second because the 3 previous ones were back in the 80's/90's). We fell in love with the layout of the ship and the spaciousness of the public areas made us feel like we were in a much larger ship. As with most NCL cruises, there were many dining choices, and all were dining on your own time. We liked the fact that they still print the daily itinerary and deliver it to your stateroom the night before. Other lines have eliminated this in favor of only providing the daily itinerary in their app. The Venetian restaurant was our favorite and thought that the ambiance was outstanding. The shows were some of the best we've seen at sea although there were some cons with this cruise.

First, I'm kind of a karaoke junkie but on this cruise, for the first 3 days, there was no karaoke session scheduled. When I asked the cruise director about this, he said, "there is a 3-hour session tomorrow", but by the time the KJ set up and figured out how to use the system, it was 20 minutes into the session. Then for some reason, the KJ cut the session off about 10 minutes early. For the rest of our 7-day cruise, there were only 2 more shorter sessions planned but one was cancelled when the weather required the deck party to be moved into that lounge. Second, the service, especially in the restaurants was great, but our room steward never came by to introduce himself and since we didn't have any special requests, we never really saw him except to pass him in the hall.

Another issue we had was with NCL's app - you could only view the current day's schedule on it and on day 5, whoever was in charge of posting it never changed it, so that entire day, it still showed day 4's schedule. I found out that apparently the cruise director doesn't finalize the entertainment schedule until the day before, so that is why you can't access any upcoming day's schedule on the app. Another thing that NCL has done different than other cruise lines is completely eliminate a dress-up or formal day. We are kind of old school and still like to see folks dress up on at least one night. The other 2 lines that we've cruised on in the past year still have a formal night but make it clear that dressing up is optional. My wife and I also do some ballroom, Latin and country dancing and we found very few opportunities to dance those styles. We ended up dancing in the aisle of some lounges and there wasn't any venue that had a decent dance floor other than the night club, which was dedicated nightly to the younger, rock/pop crowd. Read more