kasimir

From my personal experience the best prices can be found for cruises departing 3 to 5 months out, this is usually also the best time to request a re-pricing on your fare. But the popular cruises (and high-season) will sell out quickly especially in the Haven. Here are two more good Haven offers that I could find: 10 night Panama Canal cruise from Panama City to Miami, FL - Ship: NCL Joy - Departure date: 6 December 2023 Cheapest Haven cabin I could find (Haven Forward-Facing Penthouse) for US$ 6,673,- (for 2 guests incl. gratuities). Which comes down to US$ 334 per person per night. 11 night Panama Canal cruise from Miami, FL to Panama City - Ship: NCL Joy - Departure date: 25 November 2023 Cheapest Haven cabin I could find (Haven Suite with Balcony) for US$ 6,616,- (for 2 guests incl. gratuities). Which comes down to US$ 301 per person per night.

Great forum post idea and I personally am a big bargain hunter and for our next cruise (first time Haven) on the Prima transatlantic from Barcelona in November, we paid next to nothing. So deals can be found, but you need to be flexible and open minded. I do have my ways of looking for bargains, the only thing I noticed, with Haven bargains you need to move fast as cabins are very limited and sell quickly. Here is one Haven bargain I could quickly find: - 16 night Transatlantic cruise from Civitavecchia (Rome) to Port Canaveral (Orlando) - Ship: NCL Epic - Departure date: 01 December 2023 Cheapest Haven cabin I could find (Haven Aft-Facing Penthouse) for US$ 7,572,- (for 2 guests incl. gratuities). Sounds like a lot of money, but it comes down to US$ 237 per person per night.

From our experience, the infinity pools were less packed then the top deck pool. Overall we personally enjoyed the infinity pools and the area around it more then the top deck pool (area). One negative if that is important to you, you are further away from the wet slides and aqua splash area.

On that part I don’t agree! There are 3 outdoor pools, actually 4 if you consider the haven pool as well. There are 2 really nice infinity pools on deck 8 on either side of the ship, and when we were on the Prima we actually preferred the infinity pools on deck 8 over the top deck pool. Keep in mind that the Prima class of ships has a completely different concept, so keep an open mind and I am sure that you guys will enjoy it.

That is awesome, not sure if many people are even aware of this. Not that I usually plan for watching movies on a vacation/cruise, but our upcoming cruise is a TA with lots of sea days, so I might end up watching a movie here or there. 😉

Thanks for clarifying 🙂

I saw in a video somewhere that this "Haven section" in the theater doesn't exist on the Prima class ships and you have to wait in line 30 minutes before the show like everyone else. Is that true? Reason I am asking as our first ever Haven experience will be on the Prima in October and there seem to be some subtle but important differences between the Haven on the BA/BA+ ships and the Prima class ships.

@Sthrngary I am so incredibly grateful for all the hard work that you did trying to summarize the important bits in your op-ed, but I also wanted to mention the same thing that reading through 120 pages is very time consuming. I also noticed it was written at a time when the Prima class ships were not around and it seems heavily focussed on the previous generation ships. Hopefully we can get an updated version of your op-ed started 🙂 Is this true for all ships? Haven't seen that mention anywhere else. And to clear, when talking about movies, we are talking about the "on-demand movies" on the TV, for which some (not all) movies cost money?

Just my experience from our last Prima cruise with the normal WiFi package to Iceland. During sea days during the day hours the internet was really slow nearly unusable, but sometimes I checked in the middle of the night when most folks were asleep and the wifi was actually quite decent around “off hours”. But there was definitely no starlink in May 2023 when we cruised the Prima.

Absolutely agree, the cabins on the Prima class is a huge a step up! The cabins alone made us book another Prima cruise, even though the ship is not perfect. My wife that is very sensitive to motion sickness, noticed the same thing and really enjoyed the smoother ride, even when we saw significant swells out of the window.

This is a really scary story, but again reaffirms our own cruise strategy: 1. Book our own flights, even if it comes at a premium. But this way we decide, when, how and which airline we fly. 2. Never ever ever ever, fly on the same day of the cruise departure day.

Fully agree! Except for our cruise in Oct 2021 where we bid from Inside to Balcony for $300 total and won, all the other upgrade offers we have seen so far even the minimum bids were ridiculous and we didn't even bother to submit a bid. With our next cruise we called NCL, and the total upgrade price they offered us on the phone for the Balcony to Haven upgrade was a third of the minimum bid on the upgrade bidding program. So that was a no-brainer for us. It seems to me that in the upgrade bidding program they are using default bidding ranges, which might be attractive for some of the more expensive/popular cruises, but on most of our cruises it seems like a worst deal to be honest. But like you said, there seem to be many people that do not check and in the end if NCL can make more money this way, good on them. 😉

If H2 is really important to you guys, then $1800 instead of the $1600 gamble seems a no-brainer to me. In the end it really depends how important it is to get that upgrade, because the amount of available Haven cabins are very limited and also you have no say which cabin you get with the bidding program. For our next cruise, we are currently booked on an HE cabin and put in a low bid of $225pp for an upgrade to HB. But if we don't win the bid, we really don't care, we are already happy with what we have 😉

I think a lot depends how many Haven cabins are still available by the time the cruise starts and how many other bidders there are. We have simply called NCL a couple days ago and asked what it would cost to do a straight upgrade from our balcony to a haven cabin. And they gave us a price that was much lower than the minimum bid, so we upgraded on the phone and had the advantage of choosing our own cabin. Give that a try and also do a fake booking of a Haven cabin, so you can get an idea how many Haven cabins are still left.

We just upgraded from balcony to the haven and lost our LATRIPLE promo code. Still the same booking code, just lost that promo code. So make sure that the upgrade is worth it 😉

Do you know when the pre-cruise concierge will contact us? We sail in 3 months in the Haven and haven't received a Haven specific mail yet.

Since we are on the same cruise in November (TA prima from Barcelona), I also have to say that the cruise was very cheap, and since we had a 50% voucher that we received on our last cruise, we thought we might as well upgrade to Haven (HE cabin), see below breakdown. This is extremely reasonable and also we were able to apply triple Cruise Next certificates. If we are happy with this, we will book Haven more often if we can find bargains. So this comes down to $162 per person per night. But keep in mind we paid for our own flights and still need to add the gratuities, but you can believe me we are not complaining and looking forward 🙂 So if someone pays $1000 per night for a cruise in the Haven, I would also wonder what the perks are. This will be our first time in Haven, but I really wonder if it’s worth $1000 per night!? If we had the money, we would have considered going on an ultra luxury cruise line at those prices.

I sailed NCL, Celebrity and RCL (and others) and while they are not too different, they are different. I would say NCL is closer to RCL than Celebrity, but there are certain things that are closer to Celebrity. But most importantly, I believe NCL is somewhere in between, while offering better value for money if you compare to Celebrity. But in a way NCL is bit more unique in a certain areas and thats where they stand out. Some have mentioned the anytime/freestyle dinning concept (first on NCL), specialty restaurants (first on NCL), the ship in a ship concept the Haven (first on NCL), Starbucks onboard... With the new ships the food hall concept, which is a great idea, but needs some further tweaking. NCL also tends to have more interesting itineraries compared to RCL, and we actually love that NCL embraces NYC (Manhattan Cruise Terminal) as one of their major cruise departure ports as it is such a great place to start your cruise.

Such a great question since our first Haven cruise is coming up in three months, we were wondering the same thing. Specifically, my wife and I don't want a huge snack (like sandwiches), but something small and nice to enjoy for a moment together in between meals without getting too full. We would actually love to receive 2-3 macarons, with some chocolate covered strawberries/fruits delivered to enjoy with a coffee or tea on a daily basis. Maybe I missed it, but haven't seen macarons as snack option in the Haven yet. Is that realistic and is it an extra charge?

When we were on the Iceland cruise in May they told us, that it was weather related (which was true). But we found out later, that the floating dock was not even ready.

Many thanks for your fair and I think quite objective review and overall I share your conclusion and that the overall negative reviews are not really fair. We were actually so happy that we booked another cruise on the Prima again, as some positives massively outweigh some of the negatives, but yes the Prima is far from perfect. I also took some time to read through some of the recent negative reviews of the Prima, and I honestly don't think that all negative reviews are fair or are exclusive to the Prima. I think a lot of negative reviews were related to the (lack of) entertainment on this Iceland/Norway itinerary, which to be fair is quite heavy on sea days and is not a Prima specific issue, and I am pretty sure that these complaints would be less when the Prima switches to a more port intensive itinerary. There were also other negative points that were noted by others, such as cut-backs, the nickel and diming, lower food quality, less crew or badly trained crew, etc etc ... which are all fair points, but are not Prima specific issues, but more related to NCL and/or the state of the entire cruise industry post covid. I hear similar if not worst feedback on RCL and people looking at NCL as an alternative. There are now lot's of people coming back to cruising after a few years of no cruising and are negatively surprised of the longterm negative business impact of covid. If you have high expectations for the newest ship combined with the need to travel/vacation, then I can imagine that a small Syd Norman, cramped buffet and always full Indulge Food hall can literally be the last straw. I mean, we usually do our research before we travel and make sure that we are prepared. Our next Prima cruise will be the TA cruise in November, and since it will be heavy on sea days we know what to expect, and actually we love sea days. So being on a beautiful ship with much larger cabins, is a massive win for us. So I thought to add some positivity to the Prima, as I do not believe all these negative reviews really reflect ship. Is the Prima perfect? No! Can things be improved and should NCL take the complaints serious? Absolutely! But can you have a good time onboard and enjoy a great vacation? For sure! Just remember, its a different ship, with a very different concept, so try to keep an open mind and work around some of the challenges. Maybe someone can write a guide on how to enjoy the Prima and how to work around some of the challenges 😉 I agree, we also booked the Haven for our next cruise and actually really interested to get some more info on the Haven on the Prima.

Thanks for this info, do you know when this current double promo started? Maybe I can give them a call to add the double points promo.

Hi everyone, DW and I are seasoned cruisers on several cruise lines and did some 7 NCL cruises so far, and just upgraded and will be trying the Haven for first time on our 11 day TA Prima cruise in November. Now we are both very excited since we have been talking about the Haven for the last couple of years. 😊 I did read the first couple of pages of this massive topic and there is a lot of valuable information in here, but we are curious about a few things as I don’t know where to find the time to read through 110 pages of forum comments. 😉 I see a lot of personal Haven reviews about the BA/BA+ ships and videos on YouTube, but there is not that much to be found about the Prima if you discard all the content by travel agents and journalists. So we are really curious about your personal opinion about the Haven on the Prima. And how it compares to the other NCL ships. FYI… we already cruised on the Prima in balcony, so we know the ship itself, and we actually really liked it. Two concrete questions out of curiosity: - What is the alternative lunch restaurant for Haven guests on the Prima for embarkation day? The other ships offer the American Diner, but that’s not available on Prima. - How are the Haven lounge facilities at the Barcelona cruise terminal? Anything to be aware off?

Thanks everyone for the responses! That is exactly our experience as well, no heads up that we will lose the promo, only to find out later. Losing the promotion is not a deal breaker to us, but they could be more transparent about it. Same here, we got a fantastic deal and had a 50% discount voucher that applied to the upgrade as well. Also from my last cruise on the Prima we learned that the Haven very likely sells out before the cruise starts and we really wanted to give it a go this time on our upcoming 11 day Prima TA with many sea days.

So we booked our upcoming cruise in November on our last cruise since they had an onboard promo, that when you book onboard you will receive triple latitude points. So we loved that idea and went ahead and our booking confirmation showed promo-code LATRIPLE. Then yesterday we called NCL and asked to upgrade us from balcony to the haven, since we always wanted to try it. But now I am looking at the updated booking confirmation and the promo code LATRIPLE is gone. Called them back and asked about it and they told me that there is nothing they can do and we lost it because of the upgrade. So my question to the experts here, is this normal?? For us it doesn’t make sense to remove the original promo code.