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NCL - Norwegian Cruise Line
Norwegian Dawn Cruise Review
Western Caribbean

Catherine Goulden
Age: 55
Occupation: Guest House Proprietor
Number of Cruises: 5
Sailing Date: February 9th, 2006

The best things about our cruise:
The ship was lovely and very clean. The crew and staff were excellent, very friendly and attentive. Restaurants were on the whole good best for evening meals - La Salsa followed closely by Cagney's then Bamboo, breakfast was excellent in the Garden self service areas.

Cabin was spacious, clean and well equipped, restroom was adequate for space and excellent shower, good storage, loved the towel sculptures.

Spinnaker lounge was great with super views out to sea.

Disembarkation was slow but efficient considering over 2000 passengers had to pass through the Port Authority.

The worst things about our cruise:
Although obviously not the fault of NCL the snow held up embarkation. We had to stand in a queue for 5 hours before we finally went through customs and onto the ship. Not at all happy with the gratuity system, we prefer to reward good service after we have received it and think this must be NCL s way of upping the staff wages.

Although the specialty restaurants were very good we thought the cover charges a bit extortionate considering we had paid for a cruise including full board, the food in the Aqua and Venetian restaurants was poorly presented and the service wasn t always courteous and efficient (the portions could have been larger).

Apart from Belize, we did the river safari, the shore excursions were very poor value for money but when we pointed this out to the staff they didn t seem very interested and just gave us a form to fill in, we got the feeling it wouldn t make any difference if we did complete it so didn t bother. Apart from Roatan it is best to book trips directly on the port side.

Our biggest disappointment was the Freestyle cruising, it is not for us. We have cruised with P&O and enjoy getting dressed for dinner, not necessarily formal but at least out of shorts and T-shirts etc. We are in our mid 50s and definitely will not be Freestyle cruising again, the people we spoke to in our age group agreed with us, but note the people we talked to who really enjoyed it all had children. It s back to P&O for us.

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