I cruised in December 2017 on the Breakaway with my mother and grandmother. My grandmother is a seasoned cruiser (more than 25) and my mom and I have been on 4 cruises (Carnival and Disney). This was everyone's first encounter with Norwegian. I shared a balcony cabin with my mom and my grandmother had an adjacent balcony room to herself. We chose this specific cruise for the original ports of call and the price - first two weeks of December for less than $1500/person. This cruise was a 12 day from New York. Because of the hurricanes this year, which I understand is no fault of the cruise line, the entire itinerary was rerouted. Like I said, I understand that this is not the fault of the cruise line; however, the ports were changed in October and they still didn't have the excursions for the new ports listed until the day AFTER we left New York. This meant that we had to wait in long lines at the excursion counter (which only had 2 people ever working at it) to book anything for the ports.

While I'm on the subject of excursions, we booked a total of 7 excursions, some of which we did separate from each other). Not a single one went without a problem. Our first port of call was Port Canaveral (Orlando). My family are big Disnerds so we booked a shopping transfer to Disney Springs. Our call time was 1pm-9pm, so this would have left about 5 hours for shopping, with an hour drive each way to and from the pier. Because the ship left New York more than 3 HOURS (!) late on embarktion day, we were late getting into Port Canveral. This reduced the amount of time we had for our shopping trip by nearly 3 hours. Our arrival in Port Canaveral didn't happen until almost 3pm and by the time they cleared the ship and let us off, it was after 3:30. There was only one transfer for the people going to both Disney World and Disney Springs,so we needed to let the people off first at Magic Kingdom first. We were finally dropped off at Disney Springs around 5pm and told to be back by 6:45 because we needed to pick up the Disney World people last. People were late getting back to the ship, which caused us to be late (again) leaving port.

The tendering process at Great Stirup Cay and Grand Cayman were absolute chaos. Some crew members told people with excursions to go to the comedy club; some told them to go to the theater and no one was very helpful with where we should go when we got off the tender. I will say that Great Stirup Cay was very nice. The beaches and water were clean. I did a waverunner trip and the guys that ran that tour were very nice and knowledgeable. The let you open up the trottle! Read more