mandwcruise

@Mary229 @hallasm I should have clarified that anything in the Baltic : A) must include Russia B) which means it has to happen after the conflict is over to put things in perspective, some cruise lines have some May 2023 routes with Russia on the menu, indicating their strategists over there are expecting the conflict to pass over by then. Until further notice, I'm building my plans on the same assumptions.

@puppycanducruiseYeah, I just got back from 2 or 3 Norway ports on the iceland cruise😁 just trying to avoid redundancy

@hallasmWhich ports were better or worse for you?

My family likes to do low-intensity, culturally diverse sightseeing. THINGS WE'VE LIKED: Bike rides through private islands Bus tours, and walking around rock formations in the Canary Islands Disney parks High-quality aquariums Cultural presentations Hop-on-hop-off THINGS WE DON'T CARE FOR: Sitting on the beach Overpriced excursions Based on this (and the places I've already seen in my sig that I don't need to see again), where do you think we should go next?

Thanks for your input on this, @Sea Hag

Some cruise lines (NCL + Celebrity for example) are advertising free airfare. I've never taken up a cruise line on any of these offers and wanted to see if anyone had good experiences with them: how much money did you end up saving? how much advance notice did the cruise line give you as to your flight plan? how many connections were there each way? how much time was there between the plane's arrival and your time to board the ship? was customer service good about resolving issues? did the cruise line offer flexibility e.g. letting you move your arrival flight up a day or your departing flight back a day? My major concern is that I save a few bucks and the cruise line gives me a 3-leg trip that has way too many points of failure i.e. I end up missing the cruise departure or I end up way too exhausted from unnecessarily long air travel.

not that this is the topic of the thread, but I kind of wish she had reported him to protect other women in the future

Luckily, I haven't had a problem cruising so far. As I'm widening my search for new cruise routes, I wonder which ports are more dangerous than others. Would be interested to hear which cruise ports you stay away from, and why. For example, do you have any experiences there being harassed, pickpocketed, or attacked? BTW, I know there is going to be at least one person responding that all places are equally safe so long as you have common sense. I don't think the statistics support that way of thinking.

This point of view summarizes what a lot of people are saying, and in light of these comments, I just might have to take the L and chalk it off as a learning experience. What I think some people are missing out on is that my beef isn't this was slower than land internet (nobody here in this thread had that expectation) - rather it was slower than what they explicitly advertised, which was that it supported streaming e.g. Netflix. Not once in 10 days did Netflix load. And I wasn't the only one that felt that way - multiple guests on the ship who had sailed with NCL and other lines numerous times were also shocked at how bad the internet was. In conclusion, the learnings are: 1. don't bank on having strong internet, no matter what marketing says 2. if there's a complaint, resolve it while on-ship 3. some people think very narrowly how others should travel

To answer you, I tried at all hours to make things work.

I would agree with if not for the language stating they had the firepower to support specific streaming options such as YouTube and Netflix specifically If they didn't specifically list those sites highlighted, I could have adjusted expectations and plans...but I wasn't afforded that opportunity because I wasn't accurately informed.

We went on a 10 night cruise with NCL and paid for a premium internet package (advertised as strong enough to allow "unlimited streaming"). Half the time, the Internet would not allow us to log on. When it did load, the "streaming" was non-existent. I couldn't load low-res YouTube videos, Netflix simply didn't work, and my Zoom meetings were suffering so badly I cancelled them all within minutes. Why would I pay $500 for The problem started when I sought a refund. NCL denied my request for a refund on the basis that: 1. their records showed no problems with the internet Every passenger I talked to complained about the slow internet. So they're saying they never read the guest surveys? Or that the guest surveys were wrong? 2. the internet must have been working if I downloaded 17GB of data They sold me an unlimited data plan, not a 17GB plan. How much I downloaded has no bearing on the times where the internet wasn't available. Maybe I would have downloaded 40 or 100gb if the internet wasn't trash. It's what I paid for, but did not receive. 3. I didn't complain while I was on the ship So the policy is you can only collect refunds for things while you're on the ship, instead of resolving matters post-cruise? It's somehow the customer's fault that the Internet desk was unmanned 20+ hours a day? After the cruise ended, a sales rep called me to see if I wanted to book another cruise. There is another 10 night cruise I'd love to book with NCL, but there's something that rubs me the wrong way about giving thousands of dollars to a cruise line which ripped me off on the previous cruise and tried to gaslight me when I emailed customer service. Before I take further steps, I want to hear from the CruiseCritic community if they've run into similar problems, if my reaction is legitimate, and what should I do? I am considering going on the next cruise and screenshotting every single time i have trouble logging in or experiencing impossible download speeds to document clearly where they have failed to provide services.

A) thank you all for your responses B) to clarify my question, I was speaking strictly about the free stuff ( buffet and main dining rooms), not the specialty restaurants C) I see that leaveitallbehind editted his post, but I can't find an option to edit my 1st post. Is that because I'm a new member or something?

I have a hunch that on the Royal Caribbean line, the food is always the same no matter the ship...but on NCL, the food quality rises with the ship size/how recently the ship was built. Any insights on which cruise lines : A) keep it the same across the fleet VS. B) discriminate based on the ship?

just got back from some rough seas (in May) around Northern Europe. The waves were maybe 2-3 meters? The stretch from Norway to Iceland made some ppl vomit. ship size - we had a hard time in winter around Canary Islands on NCL Spirit (85,000 tonnage?), NCL Pearl (92,000) and NCL Star (90,000). At what point of size is the ship so big that rough seas doesn't really? stabilizers - these have been around for 100 years. How new does the stabilizer tech need to be to have a significant amount of protection? Is there a big jump between ships built in 2010 vs 2022? Trying to figure out where diminishing returns kicks in OTHER - it's not clear to me whether ship size, ship newness, choice of route are the biggest factors. If you guys tell me that even the big and new ships make people with 3 meter waves, then I need to figure something else out e.g. only sailing in calm waters.