Escape 9/8/19 sailing delayed

[shof515]

Ship pulled out of the pier at 10:30pm.

 

[PistolPete13]

Wow, that is late. 

 

I'm sure there'll be some interesting stories from this coming out over the next few days.

[FLAHAM]

Looks like the Escape is bypassing Portland and heading straight to Bar Harbor, arriving 6:30 a.m. Tuesday.   

[namaste1223]

1 hour ago, FLAHAM said:

Looks like the Escape is bypassing Portland and heading straight to Bar Harbor, arriving 6:30 a.m. Tuesday.   

Unless something changed today, the Escape was always supposed to be in Bar Harbor on Tuesday (although at 8am, not 6:30am) and in Portland on Wednesday at 7am.

Edited September 9, 2019 by namaste1223

[zhanger]

On it now. Things were pretty hectic in the beginning but they’ve since died down and people are settled in.. I feel bad for the crew, speaking with some of them, it seems like the trip to NY was through very choppy waters and then there were all the disgruntled voyagers as well.. hopefully the rest of the trip goes well.

[BirdTravels]

6 hours ago, FLAHAM said:

Looks like the Escape is bypassing Portland and heading straight to Bar Harbor, arriving 6:30 a.m. Tuesday.   

No. The planned itinerary is to be at sea today and Bar Harbor on Tuesday. 

[shof515]

6 hours ago, namaste1223 said:

Unless something changed today, the Escape was always supposed to be in Bar Harbor on Tuesday (although at 8am, not 6:30am) and in Portland on Wednesday at 7am.

 

This is the Escape itinerary for this week:

[Travelicious]

10 hours ago, jaapie said:

Last October our Breakaway cruise was delayed. We were told not to arrive at the NY port until 7pm and were each given $75 for incidentals incurred during the extra hours we had to spend in NY. We finally got on the ship about 1am and the dining room opened for a meal, so we ate about 1:30am, then there was a mandatory muster drill at 2:30am, the ship finally departed NY a little after 5am. We were each given a refund of the cost of one cruise day, in addition to the $75. 

Yep.  And missed San Juan.  But the rest of the cruise was great!  I ended up cashing out a lot of that extra OBC.

Edited September 9, 2019 by Travelicious

[namaste1223]

4 hours ago, shof515 said:

 

This is the Escape itinerary for this week:

Yup. Just as I said. The only change (so far!) was the embarkation time. We were supposed to be on this sailing - until my husband was hospitalized with pneumonia on Saturday (He's fine and coming home today). 😔

[Quencups]

10 hours ago, zhanger said:

On it now. Things were pretty hectic in the beginning but they’ve since died down and people are settled in.. I feel bad for the crew, speaking with some of them, it seems like the trip to NY was through very choppy waters and then there were all the disgruntled voyagers as well.. hopefully the rest of the trip goes well.

I was on the 9/1 cruise and it was rough the first night and next day leaving Bermuda...the ocean got smoother the closer we got to NY.....Crew was awesome and I think the Captain did a wonderful job getting us home safely....disembarkation was chaos...but the cruise and the weather in Bermuda were both great!!!  I don't think most of us were disgruntled, but some people were scrambling for later flights...everyone seemed happy our cruise was extended 🙂

[JPL1966]

2 hours ago, Quencups said:

I was on the 9/1 cruise and it was rough the first night and next day leaving Bermuda...the ocean got smoother the closer we got to NY.....Crew was awesome and I think the Captain did a wonderful job getting us home safely....disembarkation was chaos...but the cruise and the weather in Bermuda were both great!!!  I don't think most of us were disgruntled, but some people were scrambling for later flights...everyone seemed happy our cruise was extended 🙂

Same here.... I also was on the 9/1 Cruise. Captain kept us well informed, crew was excellent going out of there way to please and accommodate passenger's requests. Seas where rocking with large wave swells (not Choppy) for the nexxt 24 hrs leaving Bermuda.  I was returning to  Long Island my little inconvience doesn't compare to those traveling out of state , especally those flying, who missed their original return flights.     

 

Yes Disembarkation was little crazy,  In my opinion a lot more people decided to do self disemkaration then usual in hopes to get off quicker , this added to the crazyness.  But overall the wife and I had a great cruise... 

[Gershep]

On 9/8/2019 at 5:19 PM, seekingamid said:

As a warning to anyone coming to the pier, they were providing snacks and water for free, but the snacks are now gone.  Bring your own if you think you can’t wait to eat until late evening.

We were one of the "lucky" ones, we didn't get any water or snacks.

[gatorclaws]

I'll add my experience and a little of what I heard.

 

People who showed up early were sent to pier 90, then were assigned groups for boarding which if I remember right started a little before 5? Sounds like most of these people were never notified of the time change, I know no one from my group of 3 cabins was told. i only found out by reading it here.

 

We delayed our arrival until about 5:00, parking at the pier. Upon arrival they wouldn't let us in the parking lot, so we found a place to wait them out and luckily they opened the parking lot in about 10 minutes. Seems like the late arrivals were ushered directly onto the boat instead of being sent to a waiting area. Walking through security was a breeze, the line to check in and get cards was a little longer, but after that we were sent directly on the boat.

 

I believe when we boarded they had just called group 13? so people who got there early had to wait longer than us to board. We went from parking a little after 5 to being seated in the dining room a little after 6, so we definitely lucked out and got through super fast.

[Onealpha]

We just returned from our cruise on the Escape.  I will post at a later date the details of our experience, but I can say that I will never cruise on NCL again.  I have cruised many times on Royal Caribbean and Celebrity and once on Carnival.  This was my worst cruise experience of them all.  We had multiple issues with NCL, but it mainly comes down to Customer Service and consistency of service.  I understand that they had no control over the hurricane, but they do have control over how they handle the situation and how they treat customer concerns.  It was not just the poor handling of the boarding, but we had multiple experiences with ship staff that were very disappointing.  We even went as far as filing a complaint with the front desk and submitting a note to the General Manager.  At no point, even when filing the complaint, did they even attempt to say that they were sorry for our experience and I was not rude or did not take anything out on the person taking the information.  We were not looking for compensation just the faintest concern by a manager that they were unable to deliver a good customer experience to a paying customer.  We never received even that and that is just unacceptable to me and my wife.  Not all was bad on our trip and not all of the staff delivered poor customer service, but it happened enough that we could not ignore it and a couple incidents pushed me to file the complaint with the front desk.  Despite that we did have a nice trip.  The dining room was our favorite part of the ship.  The food was excellent, the wait staff were excellent, and we had no complaints with any of them.  Our room steward was excellent and took great care of us.  The ship was beautiful and our room was very nice.  The port visits were very nice and Bar Harbor was our favorite.  Skip the tours at Bar Harbor and use the free public bus to tour Acadia on your own.  We took the bus to Sandy Beach and then walked the shoreline trail all the way to Otter Point.  It was the best part of the trip.  Despite the fact that our departure was delayed and NCL completely botched the handling of this situation, sailing out of NYC at night time was amazing.  Once I have a chance to put my thoughts down about our experience I will post them, but I wanted to update this thread since I posted here early on about the chaos in the port in an effort to warn others who were sitting at a bar in NYC thinking about coming back prior to 6pm.    

[F27TW]

We were on the inbound cruise coming from Bermuda, but due to the path of the storm, when we left BDA, we sailed due west toward the Carolinas and then straight north in order to stay behind the storm.    They told us we'd dock at 2PM instead of 7AM and thats exactly when we pulled in.

 

As we got off and were walking in along side the glassed in boarding/waiting area inside the pier, we could hear them making overhead announcements to the outbound pax who were waiting to check in ... begging them to leave and come back, as the terminal was at capacity.    They were begging people to go into the city for a few hours and come back no earlier than 5 or 6 PM .. they had to stop check in because of how many people were already there.    

 

When i went to bed that night, i still saw the ship sitting there at 9:30 on the port webcam, so Im not sure when it actually left. 

 

I had no problem with that extra half day on board ... it was a nice treat for us!

Edited September 19, 2019 by F27TW