Christmas 2018: Trip Summary

Read about this trip from the beginning: Christmas 2018 Planning – What do to for Christmas?

Highlights

Excellent food
First class entertainment
Balance of time with and without kids
Cruise amenities for the kids
Random acts of kindness from crew

Lowlights

Crowed and disorganized at times, particularly the first and last days
Magic show on final day
Slight sea sickness the first days
Canceled excursion to Kennedy Space Center
Quality of Great Stirrup Cay beach was a disappointment
Mobile app was missing important information and functionality

Wins

Cabin choice was excellent!
Got the kids into the Splash Academy before it reached capacity every day
Our specialty dinner reservations worked out well

Regrets

Atlantis Aquaventure excursion was disappointing for the price
- Better weather may have made it more palatable
I didn’t look into options for preferred boarding/disembarkation

Takeaway

Overall the cruise was a positive experience. We had a great time while on board with the exceptions of the embarcation day and disembarcation day. There were too many places where information was either withheld, missing, or incorrect which make a normally chaotic situation even worse. On embarkation day, there were a few simple pieces of information that would have made a huge difference to us.

Boarding

For example, understanding the boarding process beforehand, we would have known to get there at the earlier boarding time of 9:30 instead of 11:00. Boarding began much closer to 11:30 than it did to noon as was stated on the boarding documents. Also, in the checkin line, we had already taken care of all the information online and only needed to get our boarding cards while others had much more information they needed to enter. It would have been great if there was a separate line for those that came prepared. The ones that came prepared were forced to wait behind those that were not, so what was the point of doing the work up front?

If it weren’t for the agent giving us a lower boarding number, our boarding would have taken at least another 20 minutes to get on the ship.

First Day Onboard

Once on board it wasn’t clear there were other restaurants open other than the buffet that was absolutely mobbed. It wasn’t until we finally got into our stateroom in the afternoon that we saw the flyer that told us what the dining options were during lunch. If we could have gotten that paper when be checked in that would have been a huge help.

While we were making specialty dinner reservation, when we asked about the kids we were pitched the upsell of buying the dinner package for them. Luckily we didn’t bite on that as ordering off the kids menu was complementary and worked perfectly for our family. Ordering off the kids menu was never mentioned as an option at that time.

The embarkation safety drill was mandatory but we were not told so explicitly by anyone until it was happening. We knew from our research that it was, but there were 4000+ people on the boat and it only takes a few of them to not know it’s mandatory for that process to take longer than it should. Just mentioning it as part of checkin would go a long ways.

There were so many instances of missed or incomplete communication that happened during the trip. The cruise lines does these things literally every day and it blows my mind that they don’t see these obvious gaps in their process. It’s not even as if these things would cost the cruise line any money to implement…

The App

I’m a software developer so naturally I spent some time looking through their iPhone app. It seemed like it is a great opportunity to distribute information to the people who would use it, but it fell short in many ways. I couldn’t figure out how to make dinner or show reservations on it. I would see some of the activities I had signed up for, but they didn’t always scroll correctly so I could only see the first activity. It seemed like implementing push notifications would have been an great feature so you could be notified of an upcoming dinner reservation or show reservation, or allow you to choose events happening that day and get notified so you could attend them on time. But the app didn’t support push notifications.

The app only displayed a small subset of the information in the daily flyer printout we got each night for the next day. It seems like it could have so much more info and could also be a way to let customers know about new experiences, excursions and services on and off the ship.

The most annoying part of the app was that there was a button you could press to “call” customer support. That button was really a way to sign you up for the calling plan which cost $4.99 PER MINUTE to make a phone call.

The Ports

The ports weren’t as interesting as we expected. There’s only so much you can do in a place when you’re there for 8 hours or less. It could take nearly that long just to get your bearings. Port Canaveral would have been great for the space center if that tour hadn’t been canceled. Great Stirrup Cay was a beach day at a mediocre beach with too many people. Nassau was overrun with tourists as was Atlantis. The dreary and cool weather didn’t help either, though that isn’t the fault of the cruise line. We found the ship much more enjoyable on port days simply because there were fewer people around!

The Verdict

The above sound pretty negative. There were times when the cruise wasn’t a whole lot of fun, but as you can see from the daily diary entries we did mange to do quite a bit of stuff. We really enjoyed the food offerings. It was varied enough to keep the foodies happy while keeping us non-foodies happy as well.

We’d definitely be open to trying another cruise, though we’d probably try a different cruise line to see if that fit our style/vibe better. The Norwegian vibe matched a lot of people on the ship but it never fully meshed with us.

We’ve very glad tried taking a cruise. While we won’t be full time cruisers going forward, we’ll definitely be open to them in the future and we learned a lot in the process. It won’t be nearly as intimidating of an option next time.