Dinning options

[bandjwayne]

Question for you all. Does NCL offer a dining option with an assigned time and table or is it all my time dining? Never been one NCL before and I am in the early stages of planning a family cruise for 2015 and we are not fans of NOT having a table wait for us at our assigned time. Thanks, Bryan

[jollycruise]

Question for you all. Does NCL offer a dining option with an assigned time and table or is it all my time dining? Never been one NCL before and I am in the early stages of planning a family cruise for 2015 and we are not fans of NOT having a table wait for us at our assigned time. Thanks, Bryan

 

 

Anytime, any table. No restrictions, just go when you're ready! :D You can make reservations for Specialty resataurants.

 

 

Happy Sailing and Eating!

[Sauer-kraut]

You might not care for NCL if you want to have an assigned table waiting for you. Good luck on your continued planning.

[crystalspin]

No cutting to the head of the line just because it is "your time".

 

However, we ate exclusively at one of the MDRs for dinner (except one specialty dinner), at a variety of times, and never had to wait longer than it took a host/ess to walk back to the station for us.

[NLH Arizona]

NCL doesn't have fixed dining. You go to the dining room when you want to eat. There might be a line, it just depends on what time you go. If you want a table waiting for you, I would suggest going to one of the "for a fee" specialty restaurants; there you make reservations and have a table waiting for you at your appointed time.

[DCP]

We love the free style dining....if you do have to wait, they give you a pager and certificates for a free beverage in one of the bars. There is a tv screen you can see who is busy at what times. Typically 6 - 7 is busy. 5 - 5:30 is usually not busy or after 8 is usually not busy.

[Azure Moon]

I don't know how big a family you're going with, but we've had 9 and only waited a minute or two before being seated. The largest main dining room has many tables that can accommodate large parties. The smaller dining room they put two tables together for us.

 

Congratulations on your first NCL cruise. Go into it with an open mind and you may find you like the flexibility Freestyle Dining offers your family.

 

We've done fixed dining time on our Carnival cruises and found we prefer choosing the time we want to go to dinner. It made it easier for us to plan when we wanted to dine together based on the variety of activities we all had going on during the day and evening. It even gave us the flexibility to push up or back the dining time if something unexpected came up - needing to get cleaned up, take a quick nap, run an errand, an activity went over in time, we stumbled on something that caught our interest, or we were hungry earlier than we thought we would be or we weren't hungry when we thought we would be.

 

As far as having the same wait staff, I've found that can be good or it can be not so good, depending on the people who are assigned to your table. Same can happen with having different servers each evening. Overall the waiters do a very good job of making sure we have everything we want or need.

 

Have a great time on your cruise :)!

[bandjwayne]

Thanks all. We will have to look into it more. We really like having one waiter and an assigned time/table. We did try anytime on our last carnival cruise. Nothing really wrong with it, and yea no waiting, just missed out on the personal experience of one waiter. We will be having our 2 kids (8 & 5) with on our next one and just do not want to have to wait with them to eat. Not ruling it out just yet, just wanted to make sure we know what the options are before I dig to deep into picking out our next voyage!