Norwegian Star Review
Good vacation, but underwhelmed with Star & staff
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Additional details
Background Information - This was our first cruise on NCL. We have been on 3 cruises with Carnival and were satisfied with them, but we wanted to try different cruise lines to see which one we like best. NCL offered good pricing on this 7-day itinerary, so we gave it a shot.
Embarkation - We arrived at the pier around 11:30. The lines moved fairly quickly and once we got to the counter our check-in process took no more than 5 to 10 minutes. We then waited for our group number to be called to board. We we finished checking in they just started calling group 1. We were in group 12 so I figured we were in for a long wait, but it went by very quickly...maybe 15 minutes at the most. Getting on to the boat took another 10 minutes so we were pleasantly surprised at how smoothly it all went.
Stateroom - We had an inside cabin on this cruise. We have had both balcony and inside rooms on previous cruises, but we decided to go with an inside cabin on this cruise to save more money for excursions, etc. The room was small, but that was to be expected. The bathroom was nice, I especially liked that the showers had glass-sliding doors instead of a shower curtain. Storage space was adequate, but you could tell the drawers were old because they squeaked very loudly. You would not want to open a drawer if another person was sleeping as it was very noisy. We kept having problems with the safe. We would enter the code and we would get a "Ser" error, which required a staff person to fix. One time when it did that it locked shut so we couldn't remove our belongings, another time it locked halfway so the door remained open without locking. We ended up just leaving it so the door would remain open so we would have access to our items. We were able to shut the door so it looked like it was locked, and luckily nothing was taken. Also, the walls between cabins are very thin. I could hear our neighbors conversations very clearly and they were not screaming, just regular volume conversations. I found that to be very distracting when trying to sleep as it was very noticeable. Based on this I would definitely not book an inside cabin on NCL again. I don't recall having this issue on other cruise line's inside cabins.