nightmare
Written: Jul 20 '04 (Updated Jul 20 '04)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: freestyle dining
Cons: broken engine, itinerary, nickeled and dimed to death
The Bottom Line: We've never sailed on NCL before. We'll never sail on them again. Ship was way below par. This was the worst cruise experience we've had.
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| slufoot_00's Full Review: Norwegian Dream |
Norwegian calls this ship the "dream". We called it the "nightmare". After it was too late to cancel, NCL advised that we weren't going to Estonia because of a broken engine. This left us visiting only 5 of the 6 northern Europe ports advertised. Nobody I spoke with believed the broken engine story since we had to pass Estonia to get to Russia. According to other reviews, the engine has been broken since the first of March. Our steward told us it wouldn't be fixed for at least two more cruises. Many of the passengers heard unofficially that we weren't going to Estonia because the port fee had been raised. This ship is 13 years old but to us it looked and felt considerably older than that. It's almost as if NCL has given up on this ship. Certainly if they have a broken engine after four months, you'd have to think so.
We've cruised often and were shocked in many respects by this ship. The bedspreads in our room were filthy and obviously hadn't been washed in ages. A relative in the room next to ours had ripped upholstery on her couch. Our couch was broken and you could not sit on it. The rooms are by far the smallest we've seen. And we had a larger outside cabin. The pull out couch bed was so short that the steward had to bring a makeshift extension to put on the end. And he had to take furniture out of the room for the duration of the trip just so we could use the sofa bed. Our safe was ripped out of the wall.
NCL brags in their literature that their tipping policy which is automatically added to your bill takes care of all tips. Yet they automatically add another 15% to each drink/soda/bottle of wine and at the end of the trip they advise that you should tip certain service people that are not in the "tipping pool". We felt that NCL tried to extract as much money from us as possible with little regard for value. One passenger I ate lunch with fumed when she told me she had just paid $14 to use the internet for 2 minutes. My wife was livid that NCL wanted to charge $5 for an exercise program. The list goes on and on. We felt that the price of the tours was extremely high especially in Russia where you had little choice but to book with NCL. NCL also lost our pre-booked tour reservations in St. Petersburg.
My brother-in-law checked prior to departure and was told the kids club would be open while in port. Isn't that when you'd most want to use the kids club if you were a parent of young children? Anyway the kids club is closed while in port and we speculated that this was NCL's way of having guests pay for shore excursions for their children. If that's their plan, it worked. But it won't be soon forgotten.
While we didn't go around soliciting feedback, passengers do talk and we didn't speak to a single passenger who said they would ever sail NCL again. The nightly entertainment was the worst we've experienced in all our cruises. After awhile we even stopped going to the shows. We were sold on the idea of this ship and NCL for the freestyle dining experience. We still like the concept but the service in the restaurants was extremely slow at times. In fact, on two occasions we all got up and left before the end of the meal figuring we'd get food elsewhere if we got hungry. The food was spotty. We had some good meals, but we also had some bad meals. We'd rate the food as average which might be the highest mark we can give NCL for this cruise.
We felt the cruise was relatively expensive, and certainly expensive for the value delivered. If we had researched this ship better we wouldn't have gone. We'll never sail on NCL again. The best part of our cruise was getting off the shop to go home. IMHO.
Recommended:
No
Best Suited For: Seniors
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Epinions.com ID:
slufoot_00
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Reviews written: 1
Trusted by: 0 members
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