End of Premium all inclusive for UK - Hello Free at Sea

[rattla]

Just read that from 1st April NCL will stop offering its Premium All Inclusive offer to UK customers, and sounds like we will get a similar “Free at Sea” offer for a charge of £99.

 

to be hoeest it looked liked the writing was on the wall after the first 6 months - a year, when they stopped offering Premium all Inclusive on all cruises and introduced the option of “Just Cruise”.  I think they couldn’t adjust their prices enough and it started to make NCL look really expensive compared to other lines.

 

Will be intersting to see how prices are affected now this new offer is introduced.  I guess it should make them LOOK a little more competitive, albeit you’ll have to add on the gratuities that were previously included.

 

We sailed on NCL in Dec 2017, but haven’t been able to consider them since as their prices are just not competitive with the other lines.... particularly for European based cruises.  Will be intersting to see what happens...

 

 

[cloud_nine]

Surprising you say it's not competitive with other lines, as we booked a Suite on NCL Star for this August out of Venice and the Premium All Inclusive price was significantly cheaper than a similar Suite on Royal Caribbean Rhapsody out of Venice for the same time. Even now that the drinks package isn't included in the Royal offer, it's still a couple of £100 pound more expensive than what we paid for premium all inclusive on NCL. 

[KonkyWonky]

Whether Premium All Inclusive is good value or not depends on how much you drink, if you don't drink alcohol then you will probably get comparable or better value elsewhere.  Given the price of alcoholic drinks onboard most cruise lines a drinks package is a must for us, when we compare across all lines we've always found NCL to be pretty good value.

[ighten]

To be fair in many cases the amount you had to drink to make it pay when compared to the prices they were offering for late booking just cruise prices  would leave you comatose for most of the cruise 😉 - for some reason they never seemed to adjust the AI price down in relationship to the just cruise price when it came to last minute offers.

 

As the OP points out though - this is basically re adjusting the marketing as they need to look cheaper on the initial window price to new cruisers (who forget about all those little extras) -  I seriously doubt anyone will find themselves in a position where they are paying less.

 

Edited March 30, 2019 by ighten

[rattla]

To be honest I wasn’t even specifically referring to the drinks.  It was really just because you could only have an all in package, the prices were very high.  I accept that on something like RC, if you added everything in, it didn’t work out that much different, but the point was more about headline prices being expensive.

 

Also I’ve comparing packages, I have found them to be about 10% more(maybe 100-150 more PP for a week), which is not a small amount, and I look and wonder I would go on NCL in prefernce to other lines.  I want to try other lines I guess anyway, and that includes looking behind RC and NCL.  Also while I have to book for four of us during school holidays, the prices start to get eye watering, so cost is a factor.

[heatherbelle]

Price in a BX on the cruise I was looking at £850 price in a balcony with UK all inclusive £1320.

 

i haven’t been on NCL since they brought out the all inclusive as I don’t drink, I can do without.

 

the fact that I couldn’t pick my cabin without a drinks package put me off booking with them.  It will be interesting to see how prices compare.

 

this Easter I have a cruise on Marella’s newly refitted ship in a junior suite with drinks, 4 nights post cruise half board and flights for £1300.  Make no wonder NCL’s Spirit had to drop their prices to rock bottom in order to fill the ship.

 

 

 

 

[KonkyWonky]

On 3/30/2019 at 4:06 PM, ighten said:

To be fair in many cases the amount you had to drink to make it pay when compared to the prices they were offering for late booking just cruise prices  would leave you comatose for most of the cruise 😉 - for some reason they never seemed to adjust the AI price down in relationship to the just cruise price when it came to last minute offers.

 

As the OP points out though - this is basically re adjusting the marketing as they need to look cheaper on the initial window price to new cruisers (who forget about all those little extras) -  I seriously doubt anyone will find themselves in a position where they are paying less.

 

You don't need to drink that much, if you have a couple of soft drinks/beers each day at lunch/around the pool, then 6 or 7 drinks in the evening it's easy to land a €1k bill at the end of a weeks cruise on drinks alone.  We enjoy the flexibility a drinks package offers and the freedom to try different cocktails that we probably wouldn't if we were purchasing on an adhoc basis.