NCL website redirecting / Spanish only

As I understand it this week the http://www.ncl.com website was changed to redirect viewers to a website of the country you are trying to view in. I am a Canadian English speaking person in Costa Rica. I can no longer read my NCL account info or any webpages in English. When I or any of the friends in CR I have asked to test on their computers try we are redirected from http://www.ncl.com to https://www.ncl.com/ar/es/ and there is no way to change to English. Someone in Argentina tried with the same result. Anyone else in a country with a majority language other than English must be suffering the same fate. I have an upcoming cruise and can no longer read the excursion details to book any and when I print the e-docs as it stands they will be in Spanish. You might want to check if you can access the site in English if you are not viewing in the US. The NCL tech that I talked to said she could not help me. I told her it was not just my problem. If you have the same issue please post and advise NCL. Thanks.

I am on the U.S. site but I noticed that on the NCL.com home page at the very top of the page next to the Login button there is a toggle switch for English/Spanish. Might want to see if you have that.

Tried that. Did not work and then the button to toggle stopped appearing at all.

We have not been able to login to any other than NCL that gives prices in NZD for a long time now, if we try to go to NCL.com evrything is NZD even the address is an NZ 0800 number.

The change was made sometime last year for Canadian/Aus/NZ/European customers. It's not a question of language, or not only a question of language. The main reason is that they only want you to be able to see the fares and promos that they decide to offer in your country/region, and they don't want you comparing deals across different markets and possibly booking outside of your market.

There are ways to get around the redirection (search this forum for "VPN" and you will find some pointers).

Use a VPN service to make it look like you are logging in from the US. I use Private Tunnel; but it is a paid service I started with when I needed one that met certain security regulations for my job. You could probably use one fo the free ones like TunnelBear. Here's a review of it: http://www.pcmag.com/review/346257/tunnelbear-vpn

This is a real pain for us. We are British but living in Spain however when booking cruise I normally like to use our British Bank account and book with NCL UK. In order to get a UK£ price I usually use a British travel agents website and browse prices there then call NCL London to book

I have phoned NCL numerous times about this but they just don't seem to care to fix it and yes it is a pain

especially if you don't know how to do VPN etc and you aren't computer savvy.

I have also tried muddling through the Spanish site to make my final payment but it

just doesn't work.  Super frustrating.

On 5/26/2017 at 12:26 PM, EGoulet said:

Tried that. Did not work and then the button to toggle stopped appearing at all.

I'm on the Canadian site.  If I go to the very bottom of the welcome page and over to the right I can change language from/to English and French.  Maybe it's because of the two official languages requirement for Canada but why not see what you get.... perhaps they provide English as an alternate to Spanish.

German only, no english, it redirects to ncl.com/de/de 

On 5/26/2017 at 12:26 PM, EGoulet said:

Tried that. Did not work and then the button to toggle stopped appearing at all.

I had the exact same issue back in May in Costa Rica, I just gave up until I returned to the US

I'm curious what browser the folks with the issue are having. I use Chrome for nearly everything and for 90% of the international websites I go to it automatically offers a translate button for me.

I'm curious if someone browsing from their cell phone would have the same issue, or if the phone browser would still direct to the 'correct' home location.

2 hours ago, Sailing12Away said:

I'm curious what browser the folks with the issue are having. I use Chrome for nearly everything and for 90% of the international websites I go to it automatically offers a translate button for me.

 

I'm curious if someone browsing from their cell phone would have the same issue, or if the phone browser would still direct to the 'correct' home location.

It has absolutely nothing to do with type of browser or device etc. It is the official web-address www.ncl.com that automatically redirect you to the "local" ncl-page instead of the American one. It has been like that for years, and as I live in Europe and for various reasons prefer to book my NCL cruises according to the US "prices, rules and regulations" instead of through NCL in Europe, I always have to do the following: 

I browse the NCL Europe website to find cruise itineraries I might be interested in. I then go to an American cruise website called cruise dot com where the prices listed usually are exactly the same as eg. NCL are offering on their American website. If I there find the price to be a good one, then I email my PCC at NCL who is based in the US (I have had the same PCC since 2008, so long before NCL started dividing their webistes in to different geographical "markets") and ask here to book it for me. 

It is absolutely still a bit annoying to have to do it in this rather complicated way, but luckily I have a PCC who respond very quickly to my e-mails, so I am OK with it. I did book a couple of cruises directly on the NCL EU webpage a few years ago, but the service from the PCC's I then were assigned were so bad compared to what I am used to from my US based PCC,  so I decided to go back to do it the more complicated way...

BTW; the European webpage I automatically get redirected to is in English (I live in Norway). And there is not any places on the frontpage where I can change the language to something else than English, if I wanted to. But as the phone number for NCL that is listed there is a Nowegian number, it is obvious that the website is for customers living in Norway.

We were in Panama earlier for Panama canal cruise.  We encountered this same problem, NCL website redirected to Spanish and I tried many things to direct it to English but couldn't.

3 hours ago, TrumpyNor said:

It has absolutely nothing to do with type of browser or device etc.

The one person was having an issue getting into their existing account to make reservations and such for dining and excursions because they didn't understand the language. My point about the browser was for help with the built-in Chrome extension to help translate the page for them.

On 5/28/2017 at 8:36 PM, GLYNAGP said:

This is a real pain for us. We are British but living in Spain however when booking cruise I normally like to use our British Bank account and book with NCL UK. In order to get a UK£ price I usually use a British travel agents website and browse prices there then call NCL London to book

I live in Spain and get the EU website in English through https://www.ncl.com/fr/en/  I hope this helps