Norwegian Cruise Line - Pride of Hawaii Review

Overall 2.67 of 5 view all 9 reviews

cruiselover1
Richmond, KY

Experienced cruiser, worst I've ever been on!!

budget conscious traveler, laid-back, married, love to travel

Pros

Great rooms

Cons

freestyle cruising is horrible!!, POOR CUSTOMER CARE, poor food quality

JUN

2008

Norwegian Cruise Line - Pride of Hawaii —

I've been on several cruises on several different cruise lines. I read all of the reviews about Norwegian American line and the poor service but I didn't listen. Shame on me. While the islands and all of our excursions were great, the cruise experience was extremely disappointing. Freed-style cruising is a joke! No scheduled dinner time, choice of restaurants sounds great. Until you understand how it all works. There are scheduled times to make a restaurant reservation, and half of the restaurants require an additional fee to get into!! If you are a couple or small family, forget eating in the main dining room. You have to have a group of 6 or more to get a reservation. Anything less and you have to show up and hope to get on the wait list. Also, once you got into the restaurants you realized that they were less than half full yet you waited 1-2 hours to get in. We overheard quite a few employees complaining about their jobs and about how many people quit every week and how they were short staffed all of the time. The food was extremely low quality compared to other cruises I've been on and we actually had a server tell my husband that he couldn't order a full lobster tail as they were limiting it to one half tail per customer. We've never experienced that on any other cruise line. Most will let you order several of each course if you want with no limits. That's the whole point of cruising. Forget midnight or specialty buffets, there's no such thing on this cruise-line. Most of the shows were of very poor quality with limited seating; less than a hundred people could fit in the theater despite there being 1,000+ on the ship. We overheard similar complaints from multiple other cruisers who were disappointed in the food and services as well.

The one shining light was the quality of our room furnishings and the service of our room steward. He did an excellent job and was flawless in his work.

I absolutely would not recommend this cruise to anyone. You would be much better off just going to one island. We were willing to pay the higher cost to visit all of the islands thinking that we would get some excellent food and entertainment as well. We were seriously disappointed.

Last edited on Jun 22, 2008