Age: 48
Occupation: Health & Safety professional
Number of Cruises: 5
Cruise Line: Norwegian
Ship: Spirit
Sailing Date: March 18th, 2005
Itinerary: South Caribbean

We just got back from a 9-day cruise on the Norwegian Spirit. This was our fifth cruise and our second cruise with Norwegian and definitely our last with them. The food was lousy, the décor was tacky, the nightlife and the entertainment was terrible, and service was mediocre.

Don’t take me wrong, we had a great time BUT we expected a lot more from the cruise line. We went during a very busy time, school vacation week and the boat was packed. And guess what, there wasn’t much for the younger kids or teens to do on the boat, so the younger ones played on the elevators all day or hoped in and out of the hot tubs. We felt sorry for them

The food in Ruffle’s, the buffet style restaurant was very basic and bland. They offered pizza every afternoon but you could tell it was a cheap frozen, boxed pizza. I am not a fan of frozen pizza, I like a good pizza pie, however there a few somewhat tolerable frozen pizzas and the rest should not even be called pizza. They served the kind that shouldn’t be called pizza. On Good Friday the only fish they offered in Ruffles was tuna fish salad. The cheesecake that I tried tasted like the Jell-O pudding type.
They even ran out of lemon aide half way through the cruise.

The dining room food was a little bit better but not much to brag about. Freestyle dining is somewhat of a joke. Eat when you want to eat they tell you, however it seemed like everyone wanted to eat at the same time. Most of the time you had to wait but they were installing a pager system so hopefully that will help future guest. We went to the dining room on the night they served lobster, we arrived shortly after they opened at 5:30 and the hallway outside the dining room was jammed packed with people and people where lined up coming down the stairs. Pity on anyone that got off the elevator; people standing in line where screaming at them to get at the end of the line, that they’ve been waiting in line for an hour. Old people with walkers were getting hostile and threatening people! I’ve never seen anything like it before.

They had the same comedian, Dave Heenan, at least they advertised him as a comedian, do three shows. Aren’t comedians supposed to be funny and make you laugh? This guy wasn’t funny the first night so we did bother to see his other shows and were told by other guest that we didn’t miss anything. The other comedian, Peter Sasso was just okay. We sat through 5 agonizing minutes of the musical production Greased Lighting before walking out. We’ve been to high school musicals that were much better than that.

The port director wasn’t of much help when we asked what beaches to go to or where we could go snorkeling on the islands. They suggested we look at the port map! They only seemed interested in SHOPPING. We went on shore excursion and only got to see half of the sights mentioned in the brochure. When we told the shore excursion staff about it they told us to fill out a comment card and someone would get back to us. Never happened.

Having been on 4 other cruises I would rate this the worst of all the cruise experiences. Funny thing is, we thoroughly enjoyed all of our other cruise experiences, even the first Norwegian cruise.

Home Based Travel Agent