Wind, Freestyle and Spin - Comparing Cruises

[Phillip Toddy]

Beware the over promotion of “freestyle” dining. In the past 18 months we have cruised on P&O’s Aurora, on Sapphire Princess and we have just returned from Norwegian Wind (26 Nov).

 

Freestyle dining on the Wind actually eliminated two, to us a very important, options that were available on the other two vessels. There was no traditional (set-place-and–time) dining option and it was not possible to reserve seats in most restaurants most of the time. Queuing and NCL seem to go together.

 

On the other ships we could choose tradition dining and, if we wanted a change we could book for and dine in one of the other restaurants. On Sapphire Princess the main dining room always offered a menu from one of the alternatives as well as its own a la carte. On both breakfast and lunch seating was what NCL would call freestyle.

 

We enjoyed many aspects of our cruise including many aspects of freestyle (especially express walk off). We were delighted to meet so many interesting people, particularly at breakfast and lunch.

 

We were offended by the abuse of security imperatives to conduct compulsory searches of our bags at every turn (looking for alcohol, not bombs). But these fit with the cashing-in approach at every turn approach of NCL and are only annoying.

 

This dining issue though, together with the overpowering amount of spin from the cruise director and his staff (even to the point that they high-jacked the morning information sessions and made them look like late-night ads for exercise bikes) mean that we will probably not cruise with NCL again.

 

We now look forward to our next cruise, probalby in the Baltic.

 

Regards, and all the best for 2006.

 

Phil