corey07850

We haven't had the experience of the UBP on NCL yet but have had it on Celebrity. We actually noticed an increase in service because once they got to know you and that you had the drink package they would make their own drink recipes for you because they knew if you don't like it you didn't have to pay. It was also quicker because your card was swiped but you didn't have to sign anything. Happy to see NCL is offering the UBP as a promo nowadays!

So if it's artic in Ny what does NCL Breakaway do for its sail away party? Too cold to be out on the decks! Anyone experience this? Thoughts? Thanks!

What you do is buy a spa pass and sit in your bathing suit on a heated lounger watching the panoramic view of NYC all lit up!

You will love the a Waterfront. To combat all of the eating we would try to walk 3 miles a day on it - our app measured each lap at roughly 1/3 of a mile. In the morning we would walk and it would be empty except for some people hanging out at Shakers. They put some self serve coffee and pastry stations up around the ship so you can grab a snack or walk with your coffee.

Our only complaint was that the doors/windows don't actually open up to the inside portion of the venue to essentially make the whole place open to the warm breeze. The restaurants I can understand but we loved listening to the music at Fat Cats and were hoping to sit outside and listen. If you are lucky they turn on speakers so you can hear the music but it's still different than hearing it live... Come on NCL would it be so hard to open a window here or there :)

Can't answer too much on the parties as we are usually doing other stuff at night but what you mentioned sounds right, nothing stands out as missing from your list...

Ports are great and one if the main reason we take the longer cruises from NYC, we don't like the normal boring Nassau/Florida stops. We've been to St Thomas, San Juan and St Maarten before and always happy to go back. St Lucia, Barbados, and St Kitts were new to us. Barbados was great almost exclusively because if how close you are to Carlisle Bay (5 minute can ride). We went to the Boatyard there which is a sort of beach club/bar/restaurant. You pay $15/pp but you get a free drink, free taxi back to the ship, and use of their chairs, umbrellas, water trampoline, rope swing etc. 2 for 1 drinks before noon too :). St Kitts was probably our favorite for sheer beauty and loved how well everything seemed to be kept up. We went to Cockleshell Beach and recommend it a lot. $7pp cab ride about 25 minutes away and you pay $15 for two chairs and umbrella at one of the bars there.

St lucia was our least favorite destination however. Based on tripadvisor we went to the Tet Paul Nature Trail. While it was indeed beautiful it was around a two hour cab ride away, each way! The roads are not good, the cab drivers will stop at differing roadside "shops" where locals will try to sell you various items. Then you drive through a few very poor villages. Overall it was just a LOT of driving through less than desirable conditions. All of the main sights are in the same general area which is far from port. If we were to stop again I would look into some sort of boating/sailing tour as I imagine they can get you to the Pitons quicker than via road. The ship does not sail past the Pitons so if you want to see them you'll need to do it via tour/excursion.

Just remembered one of the other shows was a Broadway singer performing

Regarding the dailies, I didn't save any of them because we used the NCL connect app which was awesome. We used our iphone as a camera so always had it with us and it was super easy to check the app for upcoming events, your account, look up menus etc. It can use some improvements but overall much easier than carrying around the dailies.

Just going from memory, in addition to the Rock of Ages and Burn the Floor shows (which were both awesome) there was a comedic juggler, a hypnotist, a tribute show to Frankie Valli and a couple more but we just went to the main shows.

Cruise was great, weather was perfect for the most part. We were on deck on day two in short sleeves. Food great as you would imagine, we didn't even bother going to a specialty restaurant the whole trip which was a change for us.

We opted for the spa pass which was really expensive but we felt was totally worth it to use on the sea days and avoiding the crowds, sitting in a heated lounger while sailing from NYC with snow falling was priceless.

Main complaint was the cruise director Julie. I'm not sure what it was about her that we didn't like specifically but she just seemed to have this aura that she was a celebrity. We never saw her around the ship unless it was for a specific event she was hosting and made cameos in the main shows. Maybe it was just us but thought she wasn't the best we've had.

Interesting event we had was the night before docking in NYC we made a slight diversion toward Cape May/AC so the Coast Guard could airlift a sick passenger off. The whole event could be seen on the bow cam in the stateroom.

Any specific questions let me know

Julie is on Breakaway as of this morning :)

If you are coming from the Middle East I would look into Condor Airlines via Frankfurt. They run very cheap flights in the summer and the way the flight routes near the North Pole it's a very short flight.

NCL related? Booked an inside gty on the Dawn out of NYC for Memorial Day weekend, checking our res many times a day to see what the cabin would be. Finally logged on and saw that we had been upgraded to a balcony room! I couldn't believe what I saw and had to keep checking it like a winning lotto ticket to make sure I read it right. Still have no idea how that happened but gives me hope when I book gtys that it will happen again.

Cruising in general? Probably my first time on any cruise ship, Celebrity Horizon, and entering the main atrium.

If no one on the current sailing posts anything I'll try to take some pics when we get on May 20th. I'm hoping someone comes through though as I want to see!

For what it's worth, I received an email today talking about making specialty restaurant reservations. We are on the May 20th sailing and Silk Harvest was still listed. Seems the rumors of SH being replaced are likely not true. Oh well, would have liked to give Qsine a try

You can usually change the info in the reservation online. In fact, I just did this for our LH res leaving in a couple weeks. Just login to your res and find something referring to immigration/Secure-flight/APIS info.

Pretty sure you actually have to fill this out when you check in online. Should save a call to Choice Air

Am i the only one excited about a pub with 40 types of beer, sports, and "tapas" (whatever they means in the case of a British style pub)?

We are on Equinox on one of the first sailings after drydock, can't wait to try something new

We've used the large online TA that i assume is being mentioned here and had to deal with their cancellation penalty... Basically we had booked a normal balcony for something like $2600/pp for our honeymoon EU cruise this summer and a couple months later they had a special where we were able to boom AQ for $2099/pp plus more OBC than we had previously and kept the 123 Go promotion. Rationale was that it was a completely different promotion and not just a price drop so it was treated as a cancellation and rebooking.

Of course i would never want to lose out on $200 but in this case it was to save $1000, upgrade to AQ, and get another $100 in OBC so totally worth it.

I imagine they do it to discourage people from calling to take of advantage of price drops over and over.

PS first post on the Celebrity boards... The past few years we have sailed NCL after they started their freestyle program years ago. Had quite a few sailings on the Horizon and Zenith to Bermuda back in the day with family and are excited to be at a point where we can sail Celebrity again on our own :)

You can register privately through http://www.honeyfund.com/. It confused some people, but then people can give you the money so you can pay for the trip. Happy honeymoon!

I think a site like this is what we will end up going with as you can include other things like the cost of airlines etc. it's really a shame that other than Carnival none of the major lines seem to have a honeymoon feature.

On another note, one of the other itineraries (labeled 12 night Istanbul overnight) seems to indicate that day 1 of the cruise you board in Venice but don't actually leave until day 2. Is this the case? If so we would love this as we could travel in that morning and essentially have a "hotel" in Venice for the night.

So we have a wedding planned for next September and as we already have a house full of the standard crock pots, blenders, sheets, and towels we would looking into a registry for the honeymoon where our friends and family can "give" us experiences on the honeymoon. We narrowed our trip to the "Venice Overnight" sailing but as best we can tell Celebrity doesnt offer a honeymoon registry... Does anyone know if that's correct or if there are any solutions?

I know Carnival does this but that is the last line we will be on :) There are also some third party generic sites that could be programmed to do this but we would prefer to keep it all under the oversight of Celebrity if possible

Any advice is appreciated!

Thanks guys for all of the feedback, lots to think about! Since nearly every day would be a port day I think it may be worth a shot as we would be off the ship doing our own thing most of the time. If the price between the 2 is comparable we will probably stick with the Jade as we know what to expect :)

So whenever we are looking at cruise options we always gloss right over MSC thinking it is more of a second rate line. I saw a piece on CNN about their new ship coming out which looked amazing so I did some research and seems like they may not be that bad.

We are looking into sailing the Jade out of Venice this summer but MSC has a similar routing for cheaper and on a much newer ship. We are big fans of NCL but wonder if MSC might be worth a shot? I know we will lose the Freestyle aspect and the general familiarity of NCLs process but wanted to check if anyone had first hand experience with both?

I checked the MSC boards for some info and while there was an NCL vs MSC topic it didn't have much info.

MSC ship would be the Divina