rajones007

A shot in the dark----

Are you using Chrome, perhaps? Earlier this year Chrome did an update and it kind of half-broke the NCL website. It works somewhat better now, but it continues to be a bit fussy and sometimes even just stalls out and gives up.

It's bad enough that I have to fire up *ugh* IE if I want to do anything on My NCL.

I selected "other". As has already been mentioned, they need to mix it up a little bit by offering new itineraries and ports. I realize they have a limited amount of ports and ships and all that, but they should be able to do a little something with what they have.

If I want to do the St. Thomas/St. Martin eastern Carib. again, does NCL really think I'll take the same ship with the same entertainment all over again? No. If I have to see the same ports again then at least I'll do it on a different ship. And chances are it'll be a rival ship.

It seems ironic that Panama is investing $5.25 billion to expand the Panama Canal while NCL scales back its offering of full transit Panama cruises.

I doubt the people who run the PC have much, if any, concern about NCL (and other cruise ships) when making economic decisions.

Considering the vast amount of cargo that passes thru there, what the PC earns from NCL/cruises is probably just a drop in the bucket.

In my experience NCL is pretty good when there's a price drop after final payment. Their rule of thumb is to offer 25% of the difference in OBC. It's not perfect, but it's something.

I've done it on my last 2 cruises. I look at it as 'free money'. Prior to finding out about the price drop I was quite content and satisfied with the fare I had already paid. So getting at least some of it back makes me a happy sailor.

Keep in mind they are not obligated to do anything, but my rep at NCL doesn't even think twice about giving it to me.

The kids splash pad looks really fun but we are looking at dates in Dec and it will be too cold for them to enjoy that.

:confused:

Ummmmm. You'll be in the Caribbean.

10506 on the Dawn is an OS and the other OS on 10 is in the other corner - not next to it. The 4 DOS on the Dawn are up on 12.

LOL wut?

Sorry, it's a Penthouse. There's 4 of them right across the front, between the two DOS's w/2 balconies.

Glad we got that straightened out! Whew! :rolleyes:

.... They don't look for priority tags, they usually grab the first, closest piece. They have to hump every last suitcase to your room so they are just trying to get the job done in the most efficient manner....

I believe that.

When we were on the Dawn in Apr '13, in DOS 10506, I didn't get my suitcase until shortly after 8pm. My wife's suitcase arrived about 4pm, if I remember correctly. Needless to say I was getting worried. I spoke to the concierge about it around 7pm and she told me it shouldn't be much longer. Then I mentioned it to our butler an hour later when it still hadn't arrived. He must have gone and looked for it himself because about 10 minutes later he came in with it, much to my relief.

Not only that; the guy next to us in the OS didn't get his until about 10 minutes after me. (He was freaking out too, and I don't blame him. He was telling me that a year or two earlier on another NCL ship he didn't get his luggage at all. It never showed up anywhere. Not even after the cruise. It just...disappeared. So I'd be freaking out too if I thought that was going to happen a second time.)

So yeah, priority tags don't mean anything.

If targeted ads bother you, then you should switch to Chrome and install the Ad-block and DoNotTrackMe extensions.

I don't see any ads. All I see is the "Check for the best cruise price" box, which did mess with the forum layout. But oh well, what can you do.

In 3 NCL cruise I could never get it to work.

You're further ahead just ripping your movies to a SD card and watching them on your tablet/laptop.

For what it's worth - I'm a big TV watcher and I find the NCL provided entertainment to be more than adequate on a cruise. Not a lot of assortment, but it's still adequate. I admit I find myself glued to the Navigation Channel quite often.

Also...There's something to be said about watching new release movies in nonlinear 10 minute blocks of time. As your cruise goes on you start to piece together the entire movie as it was intended to be seen. That's how I got to watch Lincoln on our 12-day Dawn cruise last year, and that Tom Cruise action movie that was just out (the name of which escapes me). Then when you get home it's your new goal in life to find that movie(s) and watch it, from start to finish, in order to fill in any remaining gaps.

Immediately fter our 12 day Tampa-to-Boston repo in April 2013, my wife and I both revealed how we don't think we could ever do a 7-day cruise again. We really got comfortable on that cruise and it was much more relaxing and laid back than the 7 day'ers we did previous. By day 4 or 5 most people are just getting into their comfort zone, and not having that hectic debarkation a couple days away hanging over our collective heads sure makes a difference in the morale of most of the passengers on the ship.

We were surprised at the amount of children on that cruise. There wasn't a lot, but more than I expected. Same with teenagers. I never expected to see that many. We're both late-40's and we figured we were about the average age on that cruise.

Star goes to drydock next year, so the change won't be done before your cruise.

 

 

 

I strongly disagree with your assessment about Star Bar - also it can be found on Jewel class ships too so it's there for almost half of the fleet. It would be underutilized if it was closed during evenings etc, now it's just a really nice and usually quite quiet enviroment to escape to when the commotion in the Bar City (or the pub on Dawn class) gets overwhelming. Everybody could go there if needed and so NCL already does something "for everybody to enjoy" with the bar - even more after it becomes the Mojito bar.

 

What comes to so called "hand holding" by the concierge - it's too bad that you don't appreciate (or don't have access to) extra service like priority disembarkation, to us it's one of the best perks available for suite and VIP passengers (especially on tender ports).

 

P.S. It would be highly unusual to host Friends of Bill W meetings in a bar - even a closed one.

Sorry. I guess 'hand holding' was a poor choice of words. It's where the concierge had guests come during port days in the early morning so he could sell them excursions. My wife and I thought it was funny how people could leave it to the last second to figure out what to do.

And yeah, they did have the friends of Bill W at the Star Bar. I was walking around one sea day and thought I'd check out the Star Bar. I checked it out almost every day, and 9 times out of 10 it was closed. One afternoon, however, the door was open but was roped off with a sign that said 'friends of Bill W meeting in progress'. I never thought about the irony at the time. :) .

(The link in the OP is dead....)

So when are these changes going to be made?

I'm going on the Star in November, I hope it's done by then.

We've been on both the Star and the Dawn and both times we found the Star Bar to be completely wasted space. Yes, you'd occasionally see people there, but it was sorely underutilized given its location. I think they did the friends of Bill/Dorothy meetings there, and it seems to me that the concierge would use it at a meeting place for those who needed extra hand holding on port days.

So it would be nice to see them do something with it for everybody to enjoy.

It's just like the Epic Club on the Epic. Great location. Pretty decor. Vast wasteland.

...

Assuming you are looking at 2015 the ship will have some refurbishment between now and then--including the addition of O'Sheehans Bar and Grill, a 24 hour restaurant that is very popular on the ships that now have it....

That's interesting. Do you have a link with further information on that?

What I would be concerned about when considering a forward suite is the amount of wind during sea days when I would be more likely to want to sit and enjoy my balcony. I've heard some say that as long as you are sitting down it isn't a problem - but I like to stand at the rail and look out and would hate to be bombarded with wind if the ship was moving at a fair clip. Aft cabins never have this issue.

It really isn't windy, contrary to popular belief. Like I said earlier, we were in the DOS w/2 balcony on the Dawn and we found the front balcony to be much more usable than we expected. The air rolls over the front of the ship, so it doesn't have as much effect as you're led to believe.

The concierge told us if we're going fast and into a stiff headwind, then yeah, it can get windy up by the rail. But otherwise it's very usable. On our 12 day repo Tampa>Boston, I think there was one day when we found it too windy. You get a steady light breeze sometimes, which is nice on those hot days.

The view from the front is spectacular, especially early morning port days as you slowly watch the island appear on the horizon. And late at night laying out there and looking straight up at the stars is something no other balcony on the ship can offer.

The aft view has got nothing on forward view, in my opinion. I've done both, so I'm not just repeating what I've read.

• Our butler on the Dawn 12 day repo in Apr 2013 had a name that started with a J. He was a pretty good butler, but he rarely smiled. He liked his job, he enjoyed the work, and was always friendly and accommodating. Smiling, however, just wasn't his thing. My Dad was like that too. You knew he was happy about something, but turning up the corners of his mouth to form a smile would rarely (if ever) happen. So I can understand that some people just don't use smiling as a default emotion, and I never held it as a strike against J.
   
  Still, J was always friendly, not too talkative, never complained about anything, and did his job exactly as instructed.
   
  His face, body type, and the way he walked and carried himself, J always reminded me of Oddjob from the movie Goldfinger.
   
  I would put J at number 2 of the three butlers we've had on NCL.
   
   
  
• Our worst butler was our very first butler on our first NCL cruise on the Star. His name started with an M and was 4 letters long. At the time we thought he was great. Matter of fact, we thought he was awesome right up until we met our next butler on the Epic a year later.
   
  We were NCL suite noobs at the time and we never quite understood how a butler could make our cruise even better. He sensed that too, I'm sure, and used it to his advantage. He avoided us most of the time and when we made a request he tended to make us feel like we were disrupting something more important.
   
  He was more than a little strange too. I remember trying to have a conversation with him at one point. I was just making small talk, trying to be friendly, and the conversation was going well for a few minutes. Until I said, "So, M, do you enjoy your work?"
   
  His immediate one-word response, "No."
   
  The rest of the conversation was a little awkward after that.
   
   
  
• Our #1 butler was Robert on the Epic. It was Robert who took the time to tell us what he can (and did!) do for us. By the end of our first day on the Epic, Robert made us realize that M wasn't a good butler at all.
   
  Robert set the bar high. He set the bar so high in fact that (a) J from the Dawn, try as he might, just could not pull himself up to that level, and (b) M from the Star had no idea there was a hypothetical bar to reach for.
   
  And that's why Robert is #1 in my books.

I always hesitate at first, but then I realize they don't care who it is, so I give them one or two of my throwaway email addresses that I've accumulated over the years.

Anything that comes to those accounts is setup to receive in Gmail and filtered to the trash anyways, so what do I care?

(The following is tongue-in-cheek. I'm saying this while still having fond memories of our Princess cruise. But there are drawbacks to the aft that nobody ever seems to mention...and this is what I found out firsthand. This is going to get wordy. Please don't take offense. I'm in a good mood and felt like typing something light-hearted. :) )

I once fell for the aft lovers propaganda when I took my Princess cruise. But I soon discovered it's not all it's cracked up to be.

First of all, you're miles away from everything. At least it seemed that way. But I can live with that. I need to walk off all the extra calories I consume while on a cruise, so I can deal with the extra long walks.

The wake isn't some gentle rolling water that you will find relaxing. No, it's a very noisy super-sized out-of-control washing machine that throws water around so harshly and with such vigor that the sound of it will pretty much drown out any kind of peace and quiet you might be seeking on your balcony. The noise never ends. It goes on and on and on and on. From the moment you leave one port and stop at the next, the propellers do nothing but drive the ship forward and make constant noise. And it isn't calming sleep-induing white-noise either, like many people will lead you to believe. It's just plain NOISE. (We were 7 decks from the waterline, I believe. So it's not like we were that close to the action. There was still a couple decks of cabins below us too.)

Sometimes the exhaust fans that expel at the aft will belch out the smell of fresh baked bread. And isn't that a lovely scent? Yes. Yes it is. However, it only does that sometimes. And by sometimes I mean rarely. Most of the time it's just a burnt grease smell that regurgitates from the kitchens deep in the bowels of the ship. Add that to the constant smell of burning oil from the smoke stacks and you have a match made in heaven.

Which brings up another thing to consider - the soot. The soot from the smoke stacks will cover anything and everything that's out on your balcony. Want to get up in the morning and sit out on your balcony with a nice cup of coffee and enjoy the smell of burnt toast and greasy sausages that the kitchen exhaust vent offers you each morning? Better get a wet cloth and towel and spend 10 minutes wiping down the furniture and hand-rail first and anything else you might touch with your hands and your feet. So much for relaxing, huh?

And whatever you do - DO NOT fall asleep on your aft balcony while under way. You'll wake up looking like Al Jolson.

The motion is much worse back there, even more so than forward. I know you need to think of it as a teeter-totter (see-saw, whatever you want to call it), and one end does the opposite of the other. Well, all things are not created equal. When the forward section go up, the aft section goes down. But they never mention that when the forward section goes down, the aft section of the ship not only rises but it also bends and twists. It does this because, I think, it loses uniform support from the water. So it isn't just up and down you feel in the aft. You feel a side-to-side-and-up-and-down twisting motion. You don't feel this twisting motion in the fore of the ship for reasons I can't, but maybe a MIT physics major can, explain.

In other words, there is much much more movement in the aft. My room steward on Princess explained it to me in a way even a land-lubber like me could understand. But unfortunately I cannot translate the words from my head to my fingers to my keyboard in any comprehensible way.

My wife, who suffers from seasickness as soon as they pull away the gangplank, was sick as a dog in the aft. Seriously, on her knees talking on the big white phone type of sick. The 3 forward cabins we've had since? She still gets nauseous, I admit, but even she says it's nowhere near the motion she felt in the aft. Not even close.

Vibration in the aft? Yes. Constant vibration from the engine and/or propellers. By about day 3 I didn't notice it as much, most likely I was accustomed to it by them. The vibration was always there, but it seemed to go up and down with the speed of the ship. The slower the speed = the more vibration. So you felt it every morning at 5am as the ship slowed as it approached our next port.

I would take the forward cabin 10-15 minute bow thruster vibration in the morning as we're docking, compared to the steady early morning 2-3 hour vibrations of the engines/propellers any time.

Now, to curtail the common misconception that it is windy in the forward section. The side balcony on any forward cabin is not any more windy than a side balcony further aft of the ship. I don't know how that rumour was started. It doesn't even make sense.

The front facing balcony is NOT windy either. Yes, you get some breeze when you stand right at the rail, but on the balcony itself it's not too windy that you can't use it. We sailed the Dawn in the DOS with 2/balconies during her repo from Tampa to Boston last spring and my wife and I stood on the front balcony almost every day while underway. Even the final 3 sea days out in the rough Atlantic heading north. The problem is opening that damn door to get out there. It's a big heavy steel door and once you open it, yes, the wind that enter the cabin can be extreme.

So no. The forward facing balcony's are not windy. Not any more windy that if you stuck your head over the railing on your port or starboard balcony. The shape of the ship itself ensures the wind flows right up and over the front of the ship.

Anyways. All that being said, after our Dawn cruise, if all things were equal, I would take a forward facing cabin over an aft cabin any time I had the chance. Any time. Without hesitation. There's less movement. You tend to be closer to most activities, it's quieter (and cleaner) out on your balcony, and the view looking forward is much more spectacular than aft.

Yikes - I didn't know your dollar dropped that far that $13.23 USD = $24.35 CAD

It didn't. $13.23 USD should be around $14.50 CDN.

Somebody messed up the math somewhere along the line.

For $25 I wouldn't bother wasting a dispute on your credit card. You only have so many per year, usually one or two. (Amex might give a few more, I'm not sure about them). I'd only dispute a charge if it was for somewhat more money.

CC issuers usually don't tell you that you have a limited number of disputes until you actually attempt to do one. That's why they strongly encourage you to solve it on your own. Don't believe me? Try and do one. This is a perfect example of people abusing the privilege and ruining it for the rest of us.

(The OP is in Canada. I know that as of ~2 years ago BMO, TD, and RBC had a limit of 1 or 2 disputes per year. I would guess and say that there's a 99.9% chance that Scotia and CIBC have similar limits. And the smaller CC issuers are probably even more strict than the big banks.)

Actually, I should have said COMPOSITE. Not component.

Sorry, I get them mixed up. Red and white for audio, and yellow for video is what was behind our TVs on the Star and Dawn.

If you have some sort of adapter for that, then I see no reason why you can't just unplug the DVD player and play through that.

Keep in mind that sometimes the DVD player is built-into the TV. In MY experience on 3 different NCL ships (see my signature, I guess), the living room TV is always one of those TV-DVD combo's. The master-bedroom always has a separate DVD player though.

For peace of mind, you might consider watching some videos and doing some thorough searching online in the hopes that somebody else took photos of the TV in the Haven on the Pearl.

In the 2br suite on the Star and the DOS w/2 balconys on the Dawn, the DVD player used component connections.

And the only HDMI port on the TV was blocked. There was no way to select it.

Ticked me off. On my last cruise I purposely ripped, converted, and saved 32gb of my own movies and put them on a micro-sd card in my tablet and bought a micro-usb>hdmi adapter solely for that purpose. And couldn't do a damn thing.

RE: bumping 'regular' passengers in favour of suite passengers....

I personally think that's a load of baloney. That's probably something the staffs will tell you they did just to make you feel special and elite and give them a bigger tip. But I seriously doubt they actually do it.

In all my time at CC, I have never, not once, read that a 'regular' passenger was bumped from their dinner reservation. Somebody would have mentioned it by now.

So yeah, that's a bunch of hooey.

The priority dinner reservations they claim they give suite passengers is merely the ability to book earlier than other passengers (up to 72 hours prior, I think), and a choice of more preferable table (if possible.) There's no "Well, Mr. Money Bags is a suite passenger so somebody needs to tell Mr. Inside Cabin guy he can't eat at Le Bistro tonight."

We dine at specialty restaurants more often than not, and we never make reservations. (The obvious exception would be at Tepanyaki.) We've never had a problem getting a table in a decent location. Even Moderno and Cagneys on the Epic = not a problem at all. We just walk up and they ask if we have reservation. We say we don't, they take our card, swipe it, clickity clickity click on the keyboard for a few seconds *, grab some menu's, and walk us to a table.

(* - the clickity click is probably a quick note to the cook telling him to spit in our food because we didn't make a reservation.)

Please carry on! :)

Photo reviews are few and far between, and I absolutely love photo reviews!

I balanced the plates. (but the GV is literally just two decks up)

 

Wasn't bad though as we had drinks, silverware and condiments all back in the room.

 

But my SIL went down a couple of times for meals for them and the twins and somehow got those room service covers from somebody and a tray...

 

Never did remember to ask her where or who she got them from.

If you ask the right employee behind the counter they'll try to set you up, or at least tell you who to ask. I have asked in the past and been successful. But typically I just cover my plate with another upside-down plate and that works just as well.