Would you complain about NCL food if they did what Carnival is doing?

[che5904]

One lives and learns and begins to realize that one has unrealistic expectations. I am not a veteran cruiser and tend to anger easily and then get over it and probably do have unrealistic expectatons and then when I have time to think about it, I realize how petty I look (not that it really matters as this is an anonymo9us board) so...

 

My first cruise was a year ago on the Eurodam. The food was great. They had two formal nights and not believing in dressing up when on holiday, I went to the buffet both nights. It just so happened that both formal nights they had stuff like shrimp cocktail and lobster tails in the MDR. Went to the buffet and lo and behold they had the same stuff at the buffet and I have to admit I pigged out and thought I was in high heaven and this is the way it is.

 

This past year I did two cruises, one on Ryndam and the other on the Epic and was disappointed with the food experience and now as I've been reading more and listening to others, perhaps I am the one who was wrong. On the Ryndam, I came to expect the same entres in the buffet as in the mdr and it simply was not so. They never had lobster tails in the buffet the nights they had it in the MDR (they did have shrimp cocktails at least once as I remember) so I chalked it up that there was something wrong about it and blamed the ship. Perhaps this is the cut back or perhaps I was just spoiled on Eurodam.

 

Then I had the experience on Epic and again I was disappointed in the food. Not that it was necessarily bad but I noted they never had lobster tails or shrimp cocktail in the MDR nor at the buffet not once and so I felt cheated (my sense of entitlement). Of course, there was nothing to keep me from going to Cagney. I also felt the selection say of Asian foods at the lunch buffet was not what I had on the Eurodam and the Ryndam on the epic but then again Epic has a specialty sushi restaurant, don't they. So really, I'm not in a position to say whether this is NCL policy to reallykeep the top notch food in the specialty restaurants and hyou pay a bit extraj or this is part of the cut backs that all industries are suffering due to the hard economic times (I also miss the late night buffets they have on HAL but apparently not on the Epic and I would suppose although I have no way of knowing on NCL at all).....

 

You live and you learn.....

 

I think you may be right that your expectations were a little off. I have matched the 3 ships you mentioned and for the price difference I could eat in the specialty restaurants on the Epic over 1/2 to almost all of my cruise depending on which of HALs I priced up against. Did you think to compare the prices of the 3 and the difference in that price?

[MATHA531]

Really hard to compare prices and break things down to the nth degree because all the cruises were to different regions...now the Eurodam cruise was to the Baltics out of Dover and NCL offered similar cruises and it seemed to me prices were comparable as I remember but was steered to HAL for an absurd reason, namely, they serve coke products while NCL serves Pepsi products. Yes, absurd of course.

 

The Epic cruise was the standard Barcelona-3 ports in Italy cruise that several lines do but because of the studio cabins I wanted to do it; of course you get what you pay for, I get that...my experience with the studios was okay I suppose and again the svings sort of made it worth putting up with the claustrophobia (I just find it discriminatory to be charged a 100% single supplment, something that is very unfair about cruising).....in any event, the more times you do something, the more expert you become on it, until thngs change for other reasons such as a messed up economy.

 

I don't know; I don't think HAL is considered all that upscale, is it? I know NCL is considered at the lower end of the scale for the reasons everybody annonciated throughout these boards but what are you going to do. Yo can pay me now or you can pay me later.