AandL2000

We were on the Norwegian Joy. We has some food that was tasty, but nothing that lived up to the Haven hype.

We had cruised three (3) times on NCL prior to our most recent cruise out of NY on the Norwegian Joy 19Nov2022. The first cruise was in a suite on the Norwegian Crown (no longer a part of the NCL fleet) out of Philadelphia cruising to Bermuda. It was a disaster (mediocre cabin, bad service and horrible food.) and caused us to take about a ten (10) years break from NCL. We tried Carnival, Royal Caribbean, and Princess before we were on a Celebrity cruise and met some cruisers who raved about NCL. We gave NCL another try and to our delight, everything had improved. The cabins on the newer ships were very good, the food was greatly improved, new venues like The District, and the service had elevated to good. This inspired us to book another cruise on NCL and we were once again not disappointed. Fast forward to our most recent cruise. We decided to book a Haven suite as it has been a long time since our last cruise due to the covid madness and we wanted to ensure we would have a memorable luxury experience. We made this decision after reading and watching glowing reviews about the Haven. I'm sorry to say we were sorely disappointed in the Haven experience. At this point I feel the need to say this is just our opinion based on 40+ cruises. Clearly others feel differently and that's ok. We've sailed on multiple categories of ships from Carnival to Crystal (long before their demise) and consider ourselves avid cruisers. Our last cruise was on a Silversea expedition cruise to Antarctica in December 2019. The entire time we were on the NCL Joy cruise, we couldn't help feeling that, perhaps, this is a product of the covid shutdowns. Our butler told us "no" more than any other times we've cruised. I will give this one detail that I hope illustrates our experience. On the first day we were walking through the ship and the smell of popcorn filled the air. We assumed it was a movie night thing and on the next movie night we asked the butler if popcorn was available. He said, "Popcorn is only available on movie nights." When we told him it was a movie night, he said "Ok...I'll check into it." We never heard from his again. This is getting long. Suffice it to say, the Haven in our humble opinions was not all it was cracked up to be. If you have the income and like feeling "exclusive", go for it. The only thing that was clearly an elevated experience was the escorts on/off the ship and the escorts to venues. Again, we did not experience the Haven prior to covid and believe the experience may have been significantly better.