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We sailed on Pearl to Bermuda on 04/15/2022. My husband started feeling sick on the last night of the cruise (chills, a slight fever and cough) he called the medical center on board to report symptoms and they tested all of us. He was positive and me and our 8 yr old grandson were negative. The day after we got home I woke up with cold symptoms, took a test and was positive. Our grandson never caught it. We’re all vaccinated and me and hubby had a booster in October. Even though every crew member we encountered on Pearl was wearing a mask and they were doing the “washy washy” song and squirt of hand sanitizer when entering the buffet, the ship did not feel as “pandemic clean” and “Covid protocol safe” as our November cruise on MSC Divina. For example day 1 people respected the elevator protocols listed on a sign outside every elevator (distance and wait for the next elevator so you don’t crowd it) By day 2 at night that wasn’t happening. Elevators were full many times. People just shoving in when the doors opened and of course not wearing masks because they weren’t required for pax. We also had a LOT of children on board because it was April vacation. The buffet was busy and self serve. They closed the self serve ice cream machine by day 3 or 4…I was glad they did. The hot tubs were PACKED. At one point I wouldn’t let our grandson in because there were 11 kids inside. The lifeguard was trying to control it but he also had a pool full of people to watch, including children who were dropped off at the pool while their parents did God knows what 😡 I never left the pool side while watching my grandson but the lifeguard repeatedly went up to little kids and asked them to point to their “adult” when they couldn’t he made them get out of the pool. He was yelled at more than once by ignorant mothers and fathers who returned to question why he was telling their child they had to get out of the pool. So ignorant. I don’t know what MSC is doing now but we definitely won’t be booking another NCL cruise for a while based solely on our experience on Pearl. The cruise was enjoyable but we obviously didn’t enjoy the feeling that they have let their guard down, at least on our sailing.

Totally agree with #8…we take advantage of living about an hour from Boston and have done many cruises from there because we can drive to the ship so easily. #11 is something we really miss. We are still in contact with some folks from LA that we met on a cruise in 1989. We’ve been to their home and they’ve been to ours. (They were our dining room table mates on a 14 day cruise) While we enjoyed our first “freestyle” cruise last month on NCL there’s something to be said for sitting with the same people each night and getting to know your servers. We definitely miss that part of cruising. I’m weird that I still get dressed up for dinner every night. That I won’t give up. lol

We sailed NCL for the first time last month and we declined the “free” (not free at all) package because it would have cost us $420 to add it. 🤔 Wait…I thought it was free? No way do we drink enough to justify that. Our bar tab for the week including some sodas for my grandson and a few Starbucks was about $120 so we definitely came out ahead on that one. Cruised on MSC November 2021 and accepted the all in Easyplus drinks and WiFi which cost us $160 total for the two of us for the week. Now that’s a big difference from NCL’s “free” drink package. I think NCL needs to drop the “pick up to 5 free at sea” lingo from their marketing because they’re far from free.

Hi, Yes I did. We booked our 04/15/2022 cruise around 03/22/2022 and I immediately registered for our Bermuda TA that day. I uploaded our vaccination cards and paid the $40 fee. When I purchased the Inspire tests I made our test appts for early in the morning so we would have plenty of time for our results to come back and for Bermuda to approve our authorization. So we sailed on a Friday and our tests were 8:30 am Wednesday morning. We were able to take the tests at the same time which was great. The entire call took less than 20 min. I uploaded our results to the Bermuda site by 9:00am and had our approvals by 9:32am. I think it paid off to get our test results in as early in the day as possible. Less stressful that’s for sure!