We normally cruise with Celebrity but they didn't go to Honduras (which we wanted to visit) so my mother and I booked a 7 day cruise on the Norwegian Star that departed Tampa on 1-15-12. Part of my review is based on the differences I experienced between Celebrity and Norwegian.

There were some things that Norwegian had that I wish Celebrity had, like the little sign outside our stateroom that we could change when the room needed cleaned or we didn't want to be disturbed. They also had Internet access in the rooms, albeit slow due to the satellite connection. These little extras however, did not make up for the poor experiences we had on the cruise.

The first sign of problems was when we boarded the ship. Normally embarkation is a matter of clearing security, setting up our on board accounts, and then just walking on to the ship. With Norwegian, we cleared security and then were sent into a big room with hundreds of chairs and were told to fill out forms and then wait to be called by row. This process took about an hour and when we questioned why the process was taking so long, we were told the boat was 15 minutes late in docking. I later learned that this was a lie, and Norwegian normally boards this cruise in this fashion. Read more