UKstages

NCL app the app has limited functionality before you get on a cruise. and it doesn’t work all that well when you’re onboard, either. it’s particularly annoying if you’re on a back-to-back, because once the first cruise begins, you can no longer access the data for the second cruise… so you can’t see on which dates you have things booked. two or three days before the first cruise ends, the two cruises become automagically joined in the app, which is sort of convenient… it became one long 21-day cruise for me. however, you will lose all your booked reservations for the second cruise, or so it would seem. i found out that they are actually still there, you’re still booked, you just can’t see those reservations. after a day or two, when the first cruise is resolved, the restaurant and show reservations will pop back into the app. the virtual queue is convenient, i suppose, for shows. i never used it. but on the occasion when i was given a beeper at a restaurant, i noticed that it also generated a virtual queue in the app. so, why bother with the beeper? my score for the app: C-

hey, hello again. i’m the OP of this review and i’m back with a few addenda: wifi as on other NCL ships, the internet sucks. extraordinarily slow. and you lose a portion of your minutes every time you sign out and sign back in. if you sign out and you have 45 seconds left before the countdown to the next minute, that’s gone when you sign back in. in the past, i have upgraded to their premium service, allegedly suitable for streaming and found it to be virtually indistinguishable from the regular service. i will never do that again! i was fortunate to have 150 FAS minutes plus 400 casino minutes on each cruise. and i found that to be more than sufficient. i used it chiefly on sea days and didn’t do much browsing… it was mostly to check email and send photos in text messages. in port, i used cell service. all the visited countries are part of my cell phone’s international service for $10 a day. i found that a much better buy than NCL’s wifi and, when in port, i used my cell phone as a hotspot. wifi: F

sorry, correction... i should have said that two dining credits will get your four items each... a total of eight items, more than enough for four people to share.

you can use your device as a personal hotspot, but the quality of the internet onboard the ship is so poor that it would not really be worthwhile. you'd have two or more people sharing a connection that is barely 2.5 mbps... usually more like 1.5 mbps. that's not a shareable speed. it's barely good enough for one person to download email. what you may have read is that in port, many people rely upon cell service. many people have international plans that provide free or low cost service. if you use your phone as a hotspot under that scenario, it would be shareable. free at sea specialty dining is tied to individuals and is not shareable or transferable. the one possible exception is if you're on a ship with a "food republic" tapas/small plate restaurant. there, two FAS dining credits could easily serve four people... two credits will get you four items... if they let you use your dining credits that way. most people report success with this.

yikes! i assume the typos in that piece are from cruise industry news and not in the NCL email or press release. if not, that's doubly embarrassing for NCL... do they really intend to hold audiences "captive?" i'm waiting to see what happens. if they replace "footloose with "beetlejuice" then it's not a cost cutting measure and they should rightfully be "honored to be at the forefront of this evolution." if they replace "six" with "kimberly akimbo" (not likely), then they can rightly claim that they are trying to “exceed the expectations”i of their guests. if they replace those shows with a solo violinist who performs to prerecorded music tracks (as i witnessed on the prima a few weeks ago) or they replace them with a solo singer you've never heard of who does a show called "how to be a headliner" (as i also witnessed on the prima a few weeks ago) or they have the few remaining cast members onboard do a broadway review without a director or a concept or a set which is mostly performed to prerecorded music tracks (as i also witnessed on the prima a few weeks ago), then they're not "elevating the offerings" and putting forth an "exceptional product" ...they're running a glorified karaoke bar. there is nothing wrong with doing small scale broadway musicals (or revues) with scaled down orchestras and limited numbers of cast members. that's how you save money. but the music has to be live and the show has to have some sort of pedigree. otherwise, you might as well just show videos of the ed sullivan show.

the cabins are bigger on the prima, but most of the public spaces are not located on decks on which there are cabins. so there was no exchange in square footage in that sense. the cabin space presumably came from smart design and, perhaps, fewer cabins. the prima is a smaller ship, intentionally so. but they probably could have had a few more cabins here and there on each deck, if they made the cabins smaller. i've said over and over that the prima was poorly designed. that isn't the case with the cabins... they are lovely... they provide lots of space and are attractively designed, even if some of them were built haphazardly with structural defects. the venues were also designed intentionally to be small and intimate. so there are small groupings in an atrium that holds few people. the flow of traffic is broken up by other small collections of oddly placed furniture throughout the ship and helter skelter placement of teeny tiny venues. in some boardroom in miami, i'm sure it all made sense. NCL figured the crowds would be disbursed throughout the ship in equal measure. but that's not the way it wound up working in the real world. everybody wants to go to the same extremely popular venues, such as the indulge food hall and hudson's and the improv and syd's. and those venues weren't designed to hold that many people.

the first post was completely readable!

this was my thought process, too. i couldn't imagine it was as bad as people said. in reality, the prima - based on my experience - was far worse.

well, there is no luggage "drop" in the sense of storage at the terminal. all you'd be doing is giving your luggage to a porter to be taken onboard the ship. you yourself would be leaving, then coming back to check in hours later, having already given over your luggage. whether you "drop" you luggage at 10 am or at 4:30 pm, just before you check in doesn't make any difference. bear in mind that few, perhaps none, of the people you spoke to have actually been to the manhattan cruise ship terminal. and when you say you want to "drop" your luggage, that means different things to different people.

well, we still don't know which airport the OP will be flying from. my recent data point: an NCL bus transfer from southampton to LHR on 4 june took 95 minutes. BUT that was on a sunday at 8:30 am or so.

somebody on the prima crew messed up? say it isn't so! they are generally paragons of accuracy, virtue and honor.

conservatively, a car, taxi or bus to LHR, with no traffic, is 90 minutes... more like an hour and 45 minutes under normal conditions... two hours and fifteen minutes with heavy traffic.

"the price is right" is a very slick, very well produced game show with high production values, but it is not professional show business cruise ship entertainment.

in manhattan, you're able to drop your luggage with a porter, go explore the city, meet your friends, and come back and check in later say, at 4:30 or 5 PM. in fact, you can do that in most ports. i do not believe you can check in and then leave the terminal. check-in is post security. and i'm pretty sure you can not leave... you probably could, with papal dispensation, but they are not set up for that and you'd probably have to go through security again. i do know that i did a B2B once, with both legs embarking in NYC and they said i could get off and come back on, but that's a little bit of a different thing than what you are asking. i think the best advice is to ask people on site, but that kind of messes with any preplanning of your rendezvous with friends. as for why you'd have to check in four hours before all aboard and six hours before departure... and why "all aboard" is not two hours before departure... that's just crazypants. (unless it has something to do with your charter or an event your charter is planning or with available staff in the terminal.)

breakaway, getaway and epic, i believe.

i disembarked from the prima in southampton a few weeks ago. arrived around 6 AM. some confusion with the gangway being too steep; they changed decks and went one lower. first off was closer to 8. a 9:15 am flight, even if you were able to get off by 7 am, which is unlikely, is ambitious or foolhardy, depending how you look at it. also, we had an oversea enroute immigration clearance onboard the ship a few days before arrival, which allowed us to just walk off the ship. assuming you have the same, or immigration clearance is not necessary, i think the earliest you'd be off the ship, taking advantage of self assist, is 7:30 am, but it could be well past 8 am.

well, that's just the thing... there are no creak points. there is nothing that is "fixable" by guests or by maintenance or by engineers, unless they open the interior walls and fix whatever structural defect occurred when the ship was built. the calls are coming from inside the house! and it's a complete crap shoot as to whether or not you'll get one of these rooms. and there are - apparently - a considerable number of rooms so afflicted. and nobody knows if the same problem will be repeated on the viva. i think everybody who has mentioned their struggles with severe cabin noise on the prima has previously experienced the normal creaking noises on a ship. this can happen on almost every cabin on every cruise line. it is to be expected and it is a minor annoyance, if it's an annoyance at all. this type of cabin noise is not that. it is something altogether different, the likes of which none of us have ever experienced. it is insidious and it is torture. and it has the potential to ruin your vacation. and this is why the comparison to ordinary, manageable creaking noises and the dismissal of our warnings is so frustrating. good people with love in their hearts and well-meaning people with kindness in the smithy of their souls can suggest noise canceling headphones and white noise machines and stuffing dailies at the creak points. we're trying to tell you in the best way we know how: that won't help. until you experience this for yourself, you. have. no. idea,

one device at a time, but you can use as many devices as you like... one at a time. computer, tablet, phone... it's all good... one at a time. if you try to log into another device, you'll be told that you are currently logged in elsewhere and the system will ask if you want to disconnect that device. normally, people have to be very cognizant of logging out to save their minutes. if you have unlimited, no such worry. you'll be asked if you wish to disconnect the other device when you sign into the new one.

there are typically "kill" clauses in such contracts that would allow them to back out of the agreement. for a hefty fee, of course. but that fee would be far less than it costs to build the ships. but then, of course, they'd have no new ships. they're building new ships to remain competitive and to make the way for a new era of cruising... can't continue to sail the same ships forever.

yup. the number one rule to combat bad press or a negative story: get out in front and be honest. own and control the narrative, rather than let others control the story for you. if you don't get out in front and don't fully disclose the extent of the problem and propose a reasonable solution, you will forever be playing catch up. NCL hasn't learned this. or, if they have, they're doing a very good job of ignoring this fundamental principle. as for their corporate culture, such as it is, you know what pete drucker would say about that: "culture eats strategy for breakfast."

many thanks to the people who have dropped by to add details of their own prima horror stories (related to cabin noise and lack of customer service). it’s confirmation that serious structural problems do indeed exist on the prima and my story is not a one-off and i’m not a malcontent with nothing better to do than take a minor problem and blow it out of proportion by writing 10,000 words online! (well, I might be a malcontent, but i have a lot of better things to do!) as for the price of prima cabins, they do tend to go for premium prices. i got my rooms comped through CAS, but I do remember looking to see what the rate was. on the 5/14 eleven-day TA, I seem to remember $1299 per person for a club balcony. I thought that was low. it was slightly more on the ten-day cruise from reykjavik to southampton on 5/25. it’s kind of a sad and funny story about why i remember this… i had two CAS offers, both for club balcony cabins. i asked my cruise consultant about those… any restrictions? (some offers exclude the mediterranean, some exclude alaska, some exclude the newest ships, such as the prima, all offers exclude the pride of america, because there is no casino on that ship.) CAS consultant said, no, these are really good offers, let’s get you booked. and so he set me up for the 5/14 cruise in the cabin of doom, the aforementioned club balcony 11344. he did say that it was the last club balcony available… so… perhaps NCL is not booking the cabins with known noise problems, unless the ship or the room category is sold out… i don’t know. they shouldn’t be booking them at all, if you ask me. (for the record, nobody asked me.) then it came time to book the second cruise. and the rep says, “hmmm… that’s weird. It won’t let me book you into a club balcony on the second cruise. hold on a sec…” he puts me on hold and comes back a couple of minutes later and says that the prima is excluded from that offer. but he can give me a play-based comp into a balcony cabin, which was - coincidentally - also about $1299 for that sailing. he tells me to watch the price of the club balcony and if it comes down, he can upgrade me into that. i said, “well, why can’t we just reverse the offers? use the first offer - on which the prima is not excluded - for the second cruise and do the play-based comp on the transatlantic?” he said he couldn’t do that because the first offer was already consumed. he’s a good rep, but i was mildly pissed. had he read all the fine print on the offers, i could have been in a club balcony for both legs of the cruise. (i did wind up using the second offer on a cruise on the joy for october.) anyway, back to the price for the prima… these elevated prices are not justifiable or sustainable. especially as more people discover how challenging it is to sail on the prima from both a design and service perspective. the point of my review and of this thread is not to make the stock price plummet or to get lower prices on prima sailings… it’s to hold NCL accountable. you simply can’t treat people like this. you can’t continue to knowingly book cabins with serious defects and then pretend like you had no idea there was anything wrong. i suppose it makes economic sense to continue to book the cabins and only offer compensation if guests complain. (not everybody will, apparently.) but it’s morally reprehensible. one of the key metrics cruise lines use to ascertain if they’re doing a good job is customers’ “intent to return.” will the customer sail on the cruise line again? and will they sail that particular ship? the prima’s “intent to return” scores have to be abysmal based on the number of “one and done” comments we’ve seen in reviews.

so, again, it’s not actually a “benefit” of the premium + package. in fact, the actual wording NCL uses in their promotional blurbs for this package is “all beverages by the glass.” in practice, most bartenders will give you a can, provided it’s a beverage that’s available in a can, such as sprite zero. but they’d likely do that if you had the regular premium drink package, too.

i’ve said a number of times that I used noise canceling headphones. it’s in the body of the thread, as i initially related the story and I said so again in another thread when you asked the very same question. i travel with bose noise canceling headphones and also bose sleep buds, which are not noise canceling per se, but are designed to mask external noise by playing “white noise” type sounds… streams, rain and traditional white noise. this isn’t about me and my headphones. and one shouldn’t have to use headphones to sleep on an NCL ship! this is about NCL’s insistence on selling cabins they know have a defect which makes them uninhabitable. and it’s about how, despite having dealt with this problem for almost a year, they pretend like it’s new… and they don’t have a plan - or a clue - regarding how to mitigate the problem or provide service recovery.

i agree that it's theoretically risky, however, it looks like it's a repositioning cruise to the states. and so they really can't be late... they have to get the ship to miami. they could cancel the cruise and dead head the ship to miami on a fast track, but that would only give them an extra day or two. so, chances are actually good that this ship will be out of dry dock on schedule, in my opinion.

there really are no tips for playing slots, other than money management. each spin on a slot machine is a random event. and any outcome is possible, but all outcomes are not equally likely. you could get a jackpot on every spin, because all outcomes are possible. but the way slot machines are programmed, particularly video slots with virtual reels, you are more likely to get a spin that pays nothing or less than your bet. most people lose most of the time. don't bet the rent money. enjoy yourself. it's entertainment.