Please understand, this was my first big cruise and will be probably the last one I will do. I am not a cruise hater, I just have major concerns about the $$ it takes to do a cruise "properly" and not feel like I am loosing out on the advantages of cruising!

1. Pride of America has got tiny, tiny bathrooms. If you are disabled, you are really out of luck here, if they don't book you in the right rooms...You must hike up, and hike down to get into a postage stamp bathroom, and go outside the shower to turn around. This is fine for a couple of nights, after 3-4 nights of this, you want to go home. It becomes exhaustive and confining.

2. Activities. We had agent problems to begin with, so I don't want to push this all on NCL, but really, we were NOT told that we could disembark take shuttles for FREE, rather than pay to have to climb up large tour buses that are not disabled accessible. While the stories of the person giving the tour was sometimes interesting, often times self serving to the person doing the driving: it could be we had a couple of depressed and angry workers, but really I didn't need to hear about how "us Hoalies" were responsible for the destruction of Hawaii's agriculture, etc. It was fine to here the history of the islands, but for $50/300.00 tickets, I could do better getting on the local shuttles and listen to the locals talk amongst themselves about the islands, because I did just that, later after I found out I paid to go to Lahaina when I could have gone for free! Everything, and I mean everything in "free style" is costly...even the free stuff. Read more