Nancy Hicks

I coordinated a group of 55 high school choir participants and 26 chaperones on this cruise.  It was the 2nd cruise for this choir group so we thought we knew what to expect.  I had spent 10 months getting all the information we needed, conducting meetings with the kids on what to expect, how they were to behave and going over rules that Norwegian had put into place.

I sent our cabin assignments to Norwegian on Jan. 2,2000, showing how we wanted our group assigned.  I had talked to the group department about the room assignments, 1 cabin of 2 chaperones sandwiched with 2 cabins of students.  We were told to assign our students 4 to a cabin, which was perfectly acceptable to us.  What we got was: chaperones on 3 different floors, mostly clustered at the back of the ship; students on 3 different floor, mostly clustered at the front of the ship.  The students were crammed 4 to a room in 3 room cabins.  This meant that 1 student had a roll away bed.  When the bed was set up at night, there was no room to walk between the beds.  The students had to crawl across the rollaway to get to the fixed beds.  They could have gotten better accomodations at Motel 6.

The room staff was pretty good, at least on the floor that I was on.  The dining room staff was horrible, though some of our tables had better service than the 2 tables I presided over.  We had told the students that the food was all you could eat, only to have the waiter tell them they could only have 1 salad, 1 entree and 1 dessert.  If you didn't order a drink from the bar waiter, all you got was water, and that wasn't filled up until you asked for it.  The food was nothing to write home about either.  The breakfast buffet featured powdered eggs, cold bread and stale sweet rolls. There was never any drinks, ice tea, juice, even water, offered at any time except breakfast, lunch, or dinner.  When we sailed on Premier cruise lines, there was a juice bar available at all times, featuring ice tea, coffee, milk, and juice.

The cashless system on board ship was a joke for our group.  We had told the kids they could not charge anything to their room until they had deposited money at the pursers desk.  We felt that this would alleviate the problems we had last time with students who charged and then tried to get out of paying.  Norwegian would not let the students put any money on their accounts until Saturday morning between 10:00am & 12:00PM.  The problem with this was that they were in competition from 8:00am until 12:15pm.  So the next time they could put money on their account was 4:00pm -6:00pm.  Most of them by that time had decided not to even bother, they would save their money for on shore.  This meant that because there were no drinks available on the pool deck, they were only able to get drinks through room service.  NOrwegian failed to inform us that because we were a group, each person received a $25.00 on board credit.  I found out about it by accident on Sunday morning.  Our kids could have had a more enjoyable time if we had know about this from the start.

We had harped to the students before we left that quiet time began at 10:00pm and there was to be no noise in the halls or the rooms after that time.  There were no complaints from any passengers about our kids but I lodged a complaint each night about the other adults on the cruise who were having drunken parties in the hallways outside of our cabins until 1:30 in the morning.

The purser's desk refused to help with any of the problems that I brought to them, saying there was nothing they could do.

The shore excursion booklet that we were given with our tickets listed 10-12 excursions for each port that we visited.  When we got there, there were only 5 excursions for Nassau and 4 for Key West, offering a grand total of 248 spaces for 2,400 passengers.

Our competitions against another high school were all scheduled for Saturday morning.  During the time our group was in the Royal Observatory performing for the judge, the wait staff would continually walk between the performer and the judge instead of walking around.  Objecting to the staff did no good, another one would do the same.

When it was time for our group to go the the Palace theater to do our large group competition, we had only 15 minutes to perform due to the other group extending their time.  When we asked for an additional 15 minutes, the staff literally threw us out at 12:00pm because "they had to set up for a convention that was on board" by 4:30pm. 

Every time our group tried to congregate somewhere and have a meeting or a group discussion, the staff came along and told us we had to find somewhere else.  We finally took to having our group meeting in the main hallway while we were waiting in line for dinner.

2 years ago we sailed on Premier Cruise lines and had a very enjoyable time.  The staff was nice, the rooms were clean, the food was great and we were treated like we were just as important as anyone else on board ship.  This time, we felt like the staff felt that we were just in the way and treated us like second class citizens.  Not as important as the rest of the passengers.

When I returned, I immediately sent an 8 page letter to Geir Aune, President & CEO of the North American Holdings, and have yet to even receive any kind of acknowledgement.  Needless to say, I will never sail Norwegian again, nor any of the adults that were with us.  Norwegian also left a bad taste in the minds of the 55 teenagers who were along.  They will remind their parents, who might want to take a cruise, of this when the parents are choosing a cruise company.