Studio Cabins on the Getaway - noise issues

I have only read one review that mentioned any noise issues with the Studio cabins, but having just returned from a week on the Getaway this was my experience of the cabins:

Studios and the solo life – All my adult cruises have been solo. Sometimes I meet up with one or more people and will socialize with them throughout the cruise, sometimes I keep to myself – either way, hey, I’m on vacation and I enjoy myself.

First of all, the positives – I give major kudos to NCL for the Studio concept and giving an option to solo travellers. The studios themselves are great (I had done my due diligence and knew they were small but had all the essentials i.e., a loo, a shower and a bed), and the studio lounge is a great idea. Sharon, the solo co-ordinator, was wonderful and performed a very difficult job with grace. I know, from experience, that a solo group can depend totally on the characters involved in the group. On this cruise it did not seem to be a very cohesive group of travellers, small cliques developed and then divided and remerged throughout the week - that’s just the way it was. Sharon kept track of all the entertainment requests and bookings throughout the week. (Solo activity schedule is attached below.)

I’ll also give honourable mention to my room steward (Germano?). I think I’m a pretty easy passenger to take care of – and have no special requests. He supplied clean towels every day, whether I needed them or not and I found a different towel animal on my bed every night. I did ask him to remove the ice bucket – I never need ice and it was taking up valuable real estate on the (very small) desk in the room.

I won’t describe the room in detail – that has been done many times on this site. I’ll add a few photos below of the room and the lounge that will cover the basics. For the studio design itself, I will say there were a couple of really, teeny, tiny things that could be improved. In the closets, there was no drawer or drawer type storage to put your smaller items (i.e., underwear). In the end I put them in the small cupboard to the left of the sink – I don’t think this was its purpose, but it really was the only suitable place I could find. In the shower, one or more small shelves would have been great – while there is a built in dispenser for shampoo and shower gel, if you bring your own supplies there’s really nowhere to put them in the shower, except for on the floor, and it’s not the biggest shower to be able to bend down and pick them up! Also a few more hooks on the walls would be helpful – there were 4 “knobs” on the adjoining room door, but a few more on the wall/door of the WC would have been great for hanging things up.

Hint: bring a few magnetic clips with you as the internal walls are metal. I used a couple to stick my schedule near the door, so I knew what I was doing and when, and also hung my SeaPass (on a lanyard) on it so I could grab it on the way out the door.

Now we come to the BIG negative … the noise!! Not from the hallway or even the other rooms, but from the plumbing! I’ve cruised a lot and am used to the soft “whoosh” you hear from the vacuum plumbing system every time someone in a nearby room flushes. However I have never heard it at the volume that it is in the studios! It wasn’t just a few rooms either, every solo I spoke to in the studios had the same issue. The noise was as loud as thunder every time someone in your “chain” of studios flushed. In fact some of the solo’s thought it was thunder the first evening, until it continued day after day, and night after night. Imagine every night and every morning hearing a loud roll of thunder every few minutes and you’ll have an idea of the problem. In between the “rolls of thunder” you could hear the constant sound of water running through the pipes.

A passenger in a neighbouring cabin complained and asked to be moved to another cabin, she was moved to “the only other cabin available”, which was an inside on a lower deck, but after one night being surrounded by “screaming kids, slamming doors and arguing couples” she moved back to the studios and dealt with the plumbing noise with a set of earplugs.

When Guest Services were told of the problem they acted as if it was a new problem they had never heard before – I find this hard to believe! In fact they sent a maintenance man to the neighbouring cabin to “fix” the toilet. I may not be an engineer but even I was immediately aware this is not a fixable problem, this is a design issue with the way the plumbing has been installed either in the walls or the ceiling of the studio cabins. I am a light sleeper and this noise meant I was pretty much sleep deprived over the whole week.

I also had an issue with the air conditioning – I like a cold room for sleeping and no matter now cold I set the thermostat, the room was never cool enough. This also meant there was the constant loud hum from the air conditioning vent.

Unless they can fix the plumbing noise I would only recommend studios for people who sleep heavily (or drink enough to make them sleep heavily), or for people comfortable sleeping with earplugs!

One good thing is that this trip was a “test” of the studios before my October transatlantic on the Escape. On the 3rd day of the cruise I spoke to the Cruise Consultant onboard and upgraded my Escape reservation from a Studio to a Balcony (with the latest offer, it was only a few hundred more and I got more OBC as well). Maybe they will “fix” the Studio cabin noise on the Escape but I didn’t want to risk it!

[My full review of the trip is posted on the NCL main thread - look for " A Solo Gets Away for Christmas on the Getaway!"]