Just got home from my 10 day NCL cruise so I'm a little slow with the replys. Went to Puerto Rico, St Thomas, St. Maarten and Tortola BVI. Hands down Tortola is my favorite, been there before and loved it that time too. St Thomas was a blast. Did a Kon Tiki tour and beach trip that drops you off at Honeymoon Bay, and there's 2 bars on the beach both serve food. Very nice beach.
We found NCL kind of meh compared to some of the other lines.
Sorry you didn't enjoy it as much as we do. For me NCL offers the best value for my dollar. As said below the quality of the trip can be really effected by both the ship and the group of passengers your on with.
No kidding.... we just got home from our first with NCL. I knew they would book in Canadian but didn't know at what rate. I am still sitting on money I converted at $1.03 for vacationing over the next several years. Trying to book another one but can't stomach the conversion.
Either way... With that Pick 2 deal or even the Ultimate Beverage Package on, with the possibility of my little one only having to pay the tax... Gonna have to look at booking one asap before they up their exchange I suppose.
I hear you on the exchange. I grabbed a bunch of vacation cash a few years ago as well. I'm running pretty low now but I had a few good trips. We're going to do one of the 10 or 11 day Panama Canal trips in 2017 so we will book soon and do the deposit and then we will have a year to wait and see what the rate does and hopefully pay the balance when it's a bit better. If not, Well that's life. I'll grumble and whine about it but i'm still going.
I'm finding with different cruise lines its not so much the line but the individual ship for a nice experience.
I've never been ill from any cruise ship, heard the horror stories but they are meticulous and its never bothered us. The 35% dollar and added gratuities makes me a bit nauseous .
It's all about the ship and your fellow passengers. We have been on the NCL Dawn 5 times and always had a blast. We love that ship, it has the amenities that we like and seems to attract like minded passengers. A big factor on a cruise is the group of passengers your stuck with. We went on a cruise out of Boston 3 weeks after the marathon bombing. This was an amazing group of people. Everybody was determined to have a good time, to grieve and move on with their lives. Everybody was family, it was a special week.
On another note, we did a cruise a couple years back out of NYC and the ship was filled with the stereotypical nasty New Yorker. The whole vibe was angry, like at any moment a prison riot would break out. We missed one of our ports because it was a tender port and it was gusty with 10' waves, it was also during Hurricane season so it was no surprise. I thought my fellow passengers were going to set that ship on fire.
I agree with the gratuities. Just include that in the advertised price. It's not like we're not going to pay it anyways.
Just as an offside to the discussion, FYI, cruise ships absolutely positively don't dump anything in the water within a port. It's generally accepted (law in the USA & Canada) that sewage doesn't get dumped anything closer than 3 miles to shore, and even that would be terrible practice- most dumps take place in the overnight hours and far, far from any coastline.
So, If you're smelling something in port, it was generated in port, or most often, the nearby population. Ships do a surprisingly thorough treatment of sewage onboard and then only dump long after they've departed a port.
Most ships won't even bunker fresh water in a foreign port...with very few exceptions, San Juan being one that I noticed, but only because it's a US territory subject to US water quality testing laws.. The rest of the time, despite the costs, they run the desalinators as the quality of fresh water in foreign ports cannot be guaranteed. A ship full of passengers suffering from something like montezuma's revenge is bad for business.
The smell in the port is the smell of them pumping out the septic into a tanker on the pier. They do it at most ports. It's like when they clean the port-o-johns on a construction site, only 5k of them at the same time.
We took in potable water at each port, and have at pretty much every port I've been too. I'm in the potable water business so much to my wifes irritation I notice and mention it pretty much everytime. One thing I have noticed is the fact that they never let the hose touch the pier. They keep it suspended by using trivets. I have no idea why.
One fun thing about waste disposal that NCL does, and I'm sure the others do it to is they dispose of their food waste at sea. The shred it and then drop it at sea for fish food. The fun part is the do it daily when at sea starting just before the main restaurant opens for dinner. They effectively chum the water behind the ship so that you have a good chance of seeing marine life jumping after the ship through the big floor to ceiling
Seen a few dolphins, flying fish and other things leaping for a free dinner. I asked one of the ships officers about it once. I wondered if the dolphins were more active in the late afternoon because that's when we would see them. He said nopes, that's when we dump the food waste
