Jade 1/14-23 selected observations

[shorefolks]

Reviewers: American, retired, 60’s. Have taken 4 cruises (3 NCL, 1 Princess) in last 6 years. Cruise for the itinerary, not the ship.

 

BCN-city transfer: We used Sun Transfer. They were prompt and used clean, new vehicles, although the return trip included the smell of the driver’s pre-pickup cigarette. In retrospect, we could have just used cabs. Barcelona has a mob of cabs which are easily hailed and quite reasonable.

 

Hotel Pre- & Post-cruise: Stayed at Barcelona Universal Hotel on Paral-lel. Very good choice- reasonable, immaculate, close to La Rambla, Gothic Quarter, and good restaurants. Very nice breakfast, too.

 

Embarkation, disembarkation: Quick and smooth. Very well handled.

 

Passengers: Overwhelmingly European, primarily British. Americans were a small minority. This had two significant effects: smoking and food. (See below.)

 

Cabin: 11th deck mini-suite. Spacious and comfortable. Minor water leak behind toilet came and went throughout the cruise. (See http://boards.cruisecritic.com/showthread.php?t=1344576 on much worse recent occurrence in almost exact same cabin on Dawn. Design flaw?) Our stewards were efficient, friendly, and memorized our names instantly. Towel animal enthusiasts would have been happy with the variety.

 

The stewards’ one service flaw was a problem area we have encountered before: wine glasses. Having ordered two bottles of wine for the cabin (see next item), I was happy that they arrived with an opener but, oddly, there were no glasses. (Yes, I know I can get them from the bar, but why should I have to?) When I asked the steward for two glasses, he produced them but then did his best to ignore them for the week. It got to be a joke: how could we arrange the glasses so as to call attention to the need for clean ones? Put them with dirty coffee cups? Leave them alone on the table? Sometimes it would work; more often not. Go figure.

 

Pre-ordering wine: We like red wine at the end of the day, and I usually pre-order some bottles for the cabin. Never again. While I am used to paying a premium onboard as opposed to ashore, I was not prepared for about a $10 premium per pre-ordered bottle compared to what the same bottle cost once the cruise was under way. That is just a blatant rip-off.

 

Smoking: Definitely a greater factor than on previous cruises. Cabin had mild smoke aroma when we embarked. Smell dissipated only after several hours of keeping balcony door open. (One more reason to get a balcony.) Frequently smelled smoke when on balcony, either from adjacent cabins or pool deck above. Not severe, but definitely present. Expect to run into pockets of smoke as you take your “fresh air” stroll on the promenade deck. Worst of all was the Great Outdoors, an otherwise lovely place for breakfast or lunch. Why does NCL allow smoking in this eating venue?

 

Food: Biggest disappointment of the trip by far. Easily worse than any of our other cruises. NCL is obviously catering to this cruise’s biggest customer group, the Brits. They’re wonderful, congenial folks, but not usually noted for their spirit of culinary adventure. The main dining room food was accordingly dull and boring. Those for whom “dining out” means Sunday dinner at the mom-and-pop on Main Street will be right at home with that menu. Considering that the cruise visited Spain, Portugal, and Morocco, there was very little effort to showcase local cuisine. By the way, the low ceiling in Alizar magnifies the noise factor a lot. The Grand Pacific can also be noisy but not nearly as bad.

 

Our best meals were at Le Bistro, which is excellent but has a short and unchanging menu, and the Oriental restaurant, Jasmine Garden. We ate at the latter twice, once for sushi (which was good but not quite up to what we can get at home). Also excellent was the once-only,German-themed luncheon at Great Outdoors, which featured 3 kinds of sausage and roast suckling pig. There was a Spanish lunch also, but bad scheduling on our part kept us away.

 

We did not eat at Teppanyaki but had a fairly close view of it: four hibachi tables crammed into a small, smoky room. There is a window onto the corridor, and passers-by stop to stare at you while you eat.

 

Worst of all were the buffets and Blue Lagoon. In the former, the hot food was dried out, and the areas were crowded, noisy and very stuffy. For some reason, people there have no compunction against sitting down at your table uninvited. If you are nostalgic for your high-school cafeteria, you’ll love it. Blue Lagoon is much quieter, but the food is just as bad. Hamburgers that could double as shuffleboard weights and so-called “hot” wings that were so bland as to start a fistfight if served in Buffalo. While we were struggling with that, an older British couple next to us was waxing ecstatic over their “lovely biscuit.” Get the picture?

 

Service-wise, the specialty restaurants are also superior. The main dining room help are a mixed lot: some very friendly, some surly, some efficient, some hopelessly overwhelmed.

 

Freestyle: For us, this is the major attraction of NCL in cases where the costs and itineraries of other lines are comparable. It works reasonably well. On this cruise there were very few cases of people dressed inordinately badly. Similarly, the Dress Up Or Not nights had only a very, very few tuxes and even fewer jackets. Most everyone stuck to a rough approximation of resort casual. Some problems did develop regarding availability of dining venues. Not, as on other NCL cruises, with the ala carte restaurants, surprisingly. They were always wide open. The main dining rooms, however, sometimes had 30-minute waits, especially in the beginning of the week. As two people, we were always asked to share a table- and always refused. That is NOT why we chose NCL.

 

Noro & sanitation: NCL has definitely stepped up its preventative measures, with many more sanitizer stations and staff with spray bottles. The globe-shaped stations are still inconsistent in their function, however. Unfortunately, the logic behind the sanitation is not always well thought out: insert a person (mid-cruise) to hand out plates and napkins but allow people to serve themselves at buffets. After getting sprayed and having a plate handed to them, people were able to grab (and replace!) rolls and other items on the food trays. A word of warning: after running the sanitizer gauntlet at meals, make heavy use of hand lotion back in your room. The torrent of cleansing alcohol that we got left our hands cracked and bleeding. Imagine that when people are grabbing buffet food?

 

“Nickel-and-diming”: NCL is often accused of this, as are cruise lines in general. We personally don’t feel that this is the case. Constantly advertising spa specials, bingo, “art” auctions, etc. is merely selling. You are free to ignore it, as we invariably did. However, there is one exception which, while not for a large amount, is just egregious in nature and thoroughly annoying: dropping you at a pier in a large and remote commercial dock area and then forcing you to pay to get to anyplace even remotely worth seeing. In Agadir, there were NCL shuttle buses that took you into town for $8.50 r/t and then dropped you in the middle of a fairly uninteresting hotel section. A cab would be a better bet. In Malaga, there was a city shuttle bus that cost only 3.5 euros r/t (make sure you have your euros ready when you leave the ship). In Madeira there is a long walk from the pier with only cabs available. While these are indeed trivial amounts, it would be so much better if NCL just built this sort of thing into the cruise price and made arrangements with a local supplier. I have to think that the resulting customer satisfaction would be worth it.

 

Local currency: Get yourself a supply of euros, preferably at an airport ATM after you clear customs and/or in the several ports. The only non-euro country is Morocco, and vendors there all seemed used to (and preferred) euros. Don’t expect NCL to be of much help with this. To exchange money onboard (a very bad idea) they want a $10 service charge. I’m sure the exchange rate can’t be great, either. They will also balk at breaking large euro bills. (ATMs frequently dispense 50s; choose an odd amount so that you at least get a 20, if not a 10.) It’s not that the ship doesn’t have plenty of euro currency; the Jade sails almost exclusively in “euro waters.” Think about it: would any hotel of this size get away with not providing such a service to its guests?

 

Excursions: We generally shy away from cruise-ship excursions, feeling them to be over-priced and over-directed, but we did take the Imperial Rabat and Casablanca tour for $99. At the end of the day, we were glad we did. I know that others have reported doing this on their own, but I just don’t think that you could get in all that we saw and did without an awful lot of effort and research on your own. There was a very nice included lunch at a seaside restaurant, as well.

 

Casablanca: the entire day was taken up by the tour described above.

 

Agadir: We hired a cab for a birding tour of our own. The ride up the coast to Tamri was beautiful. Coming back, we ran into a complete traffic shutdown because the king was in town, apparently to enjoy his favorite sport of jet-skiing. We were lucky that it did not last long, but things can get dicey, we were told. Allow plenty of time to return to the ship.

 

Las Palmas: Again hired a cab tour of our own. Be warned that you need to bargain aggressively. He started at 100 euros, but finally settled for 55. Went to the Botanical Garden, the volcanic crater (great little lunch stop at the top), and the Old Town.

 

Madeira: Had a pre-arranged birding tour which naturally included some spectacular scenic areas. By all means get out of Funchal and see the island. There are huge seaside cliffs to rival Ireland and Scotland.

 

Malaga: We had previously seen Granada and Ronda and thus elected to spend the day in Malaga. Great strolling city with an interesting cathedral and good restaurants for lunch. If you go to the cathedral, there should be government-run guides who provide English tours inside. Ours was very knowledgeable and provided an extensive tour at no additional cost. At the end, she quickly disappeared before any of us could give her a tip, which she richly deserved.

 

Entertainment: We attended more shows than usual this trip. I myself do not usually attend any, and I quickly remembered why here. There was a magician with the usual stuff: scarves, rings, boxes, and an outsized ego. When his assistant holds up the velvet bag, you can see the pigeons moving around inside. There is a reason he is not in Vegas. There was also a 60’s music show which was strictly from a British perspective, right down to the Union Jacks at the end. Heavy on Petula Clark, this is not a doo-wop show. Some of the songs were almost unrecognizable until you heard a lot of the lyrics.

 

The new production show, Elements, was also presented. It is not a cheap production, and the crowd loved it. It had an awful lot of pseudo-ethereal arm-waving and writhing bodies, and the magician would periodically appear. His tricks were better here, but David Copperfield he is not.

 

Final thoughts: Generally a good cruise, although it could have been better (and NCL has done better). We would certainly consider NCL again, if the itinerary and cost warranted it. We have a Princess cruise scheduled for late February. It should provide a good opportunity for comparison.