EPIC themed reception tomorrow night in Boston

[negc]

NCL is holding a reception for the travel industry in Boston tomorrow night to promote the EPIC. Hopefully they will reveal more information about the ship or be able to answer some of the questions that have arisen over the past few months. If there is anything new to report I am sure it will be reported here on Thursday.:)

[negc]

Attended what I considered to be a rather lacklustre presentation by NCL execs from Miami headquarters at a downtown Boston hotel last night. About 300 members of the local travel industry (agents etc.) were in attendance and watched a brief video that was taped in a virtual ice bar in Miami and featured some comments from the EPIC hotel director and its Entertainment Director, followed by a slide presentation featuring the ship and its various features. Nothing especially newsworthy was revealed and it certainly didn't compare to the Oasis reveal that RCI held in NYC prior to the debut of that ship. Windows in the studio staterooms will have "one-way" glass but no mention of whether or not they have found a solution to the problem of "one way" glass becoming "two-way" when a light is on in the stateroom (and in an interior room, I imagine that there would be a light on most of the time) has been resolved. :D

At the conclusion of the presentation there was a brief question and answer period and five lucky attendees won a cruise on the ship. Cocktails and nominal hors' d'ouevres were served at the end of the program but by 8pm, most attendees were anxious to leave and get something more substantial to eat. Upon leaving the meeting room and going to retrieve our cars from the hotel garage, we discovered that NCL was underwriting a portion of the parking cost by a total of $4.00 so our cost for two hours of parking was only $22 instead of the hotel's regular fee of $26. :eek: Had we lingered for cocktails the parking cost would have risen to $28 or more.:mad:

With so many other meeting facilities in the greater Boston area that offer similar or better meeting facilities with no parking fee, one has to wonder why they chose the Westin hotel. I doubt that having to pay $22 (or more) to view a rather pedestrian slide show that revealed little or nothing that wasn't already available elsewhere may not have endeared NCL to many in the audience of what the NCL reps considered "valuable travel partners".

[negc]

Any questions or comments? :confused:

[ColinIllinois]

Thanks for keeping us updated. Not much news there to digest though.

[negc]

Thanks for keeping us updated. Not much news there to digest though.

 

Exactly. Which is part of the reason I found the event less than valuable for people who will be selling this ship to the public. Their VP of Sales is definitely not great at making public presentations and might well have found someone else better suited to do the honors. Any of the local NCL reps would have been better than Camille. At one point someone asked her how many crew would be on EPIC and she hesitated but finally sort of blurted out: 1900. According to the EPIC brochure she was only off by a little bit more than 200 since the number is apparently 1628 or so. Would have thought she might have at least had the basic statistics down.:rolleyes: