Comments on Joy from an NCL newbie

[CCJack]

A few comments on our 9/13 NCL Joy cruise.  We are new to NCL.

 

Food… Excellent across the board.   Buffet, MDR (3 dinners) and Specialty (4 dinners) all better than other more costly cruise lines we have been on (Viking, Cunard, Celebrity).

 

Service…  Outstanding service from cabin steward and wait staff…We did get some bad info from guest services, but all other staff was great.

 

Cabin…  Our cabin was great.. Looked newer than the ship is, clean, modern and everything worked!   I likely would not book our cabin type again, however.   My fault…. I didn’t think it through, we booked deck 8 club balcony suite with the large balcony.   For just my wife and I we did not need a large balcony and there are some drawbacks to those balconies.   They are the same width as a normal cabin, but the balcony is probably 4x as deep.   This means when you are in your cabin looking out through glass door, you have tunnel vision with the deep balcony and a much narrower view of the ocean.  Plus these balconies are completely uncovered and thus exposed to the elements.   They were very windy and almost unusable.   I believe the normal-sized balconies are all covered, and we would have enjoyed a normal-sized balcony more.

 

Ship.. No complaints, the Joy is clean, looks new and is big.  Not our favorite ship (our last cruise was Celebrity Apex which sets the bar high) – but I would go again on the Joy for the right itinerary, etc.   Note that on the Joy a lot of real estate is used for kid’s activities (great if you are a kid).  The go carts and the laser tag take a lot of the space on the sun decks.  I don’t know why they put the laser tag on the sun deck since it is a big enclosed box – it needs to be dark inside.  They could have put that on a lower deck in my opinion.   Thus, the remaining swimming pool – jogging track area available to non-Haven folks is not that big considering the size of the ship.

 

Free-Style Cruising….I know a lot of cruise lines are doing something similar, but I am not sure I am a fan of this.   It seemed like on this ship it quickly becomes a task of getting a lot of reservations for dining and entertainment.  Even though we made reservations before the cruise, you still have to take what times you can get sometimes and that is the opposite of what free-style implies (that you can go when you want).  It seems like they are putting more and more people on these ships but not increasing the theater size, etc.   On the Joy there is only 1 big theater rather than 2.   I would guess that a lot of people don’t get reservations or are late to try and then they don’t get to go at all to some of the entertainment.   It never used to be that way with cruising... there was always a seat for everyone.

 

All said, we had a great trip and our experience with NCL was a positive one.

Edited September 30, 2023 by CCJack

[Cruising Lynne]

Glad that you enjoyed your cruise. Great to hear that the dining was on par with the other lines you cruised with. For future reference, the smaller NCL ships do not require reservations for the shows. 

[mjkacmom]

I know people seem to like to make MDR reservations, but we don’t, and have never waited for a table (we are a family of 7 and I really appreciate not having to have a pre-booked time for dinner)