My husband and I chose this as our first ever cruise at the recommendation of my friend who also happens to be a travel agent. She set us up with the works, and we were thrilled at the idea of heading to the Bahamas to get away for our wedding anniversary during the cold winter months. We had everything sorted for the promos and options that Norwegian was famous for. BOY, WERE WE WRONG. We flew to Miami, got to the terminal, and waited around for well over five hours in the terminal hoping that we would be able to board. As it turned out, the Norwegian Jade was "parked in our spot," so the full ship of existing Sky passengers could not disembark. It was absolute chaos, and as we watched the only vending machine in the terminal dwindle down row by row, there were about 1800 passengers with us in the terminal. Not one single announcement had been made to attempt to explain or give us any sort of time frame on when we would be able to board, the drink machine had broken, and everyone was miserable. We were finally able to board around 8-9pm. The next three days were feeble attempts by the crew and staff to sort of make up for it, and we never did receive an explanation or apology.

Amenities: We were supposed to receive about $500 in onboard credit, one night at a specialty dining restaurant (not that we would have been able to find it in the labyrinth of a small ship that the Sky is, anyway), and 100 minutes of free on-board WiFi. We received zero of those things, and when we tried to talk to the Guest Services agent about it, he insisted that it was "not his problem" multiple times, and informed us that our travel agent must have messed things up for our reservation. He offered to try and contact her for us on our behalf, but I was literally having a text message conversation with her at the time, so I declined. I tried to explain that she had already contacted NCL directly, and they had told her they adjusted the reservation the day after she upgraded our room, but the Guest Services agent would not let me speak more than three words before he interrupted me to tell me again that it was "not his problem, this is your problem." We finally just lowered our expectations of what we would experience with our first cruise, and tried to have a good time. It was tough to catch a buzz with the clearly watered-down drinks, but the food was good. The activities were awkward and the cruise staff seemed to be forcing their enthusiasm, but we had a blast when we actually got off the ship and hung out a little bit on two out of the three islands we stopped for port. We didn't leave the ship on the last day because there was a storm that the Captain wanted to avoid (Spoiler alert: We cruised through it anyway), so we had to cut out of our port in Nassau three hours early. We didn't see a point in getting off the ship just to get right back on it, so we hung out by the pool instead. A few days later, our card had been charged over $200 with no statement of what we were actually billed for, and that's that!

The storm the last night was pretty rough, but the Captain pushed that ship the heck through it, and we got off the boat at 8am on Friday morning. Read more