Susan X :
My family is planning a 7 day cruise in the Mediterranean in August. We would like to cruise from Venice to the Greek Isles and Turkey.
I found itineraries from both Norwegian Cruise Line and Royal Caribbean that fit our time restrictions and destination, and I was just wondering if anyone can give some pros and cons for either line from past experience.
We’ve sailed with Norwegian Cruise Line before and I loved the whole “freestyle” dining thing, but I thought it was kind of disorganized (ie. it was hard to find an empty table in the main dining hall during mealtimes). We plan on traveling with two other families, and on Royal Caribbean, would it be possible to have dinner together?
Also if you’ve gone on either of these cruises, how did you like them?
Here are the ports of call:
Norwegian Cruise Line: Venice, Dubrovnik, Athens (Piraeus), Ephesus (Izmir), Nafplion, Venice
Royal Caribbean: Venice, Dubrovnik, Kusadasi (Ephesus), Santorini, Corfu, Venice
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OK, I cruised on Royal Caribbean to the Eastern Mediterranean twice; last time was this past November on The Brilliance of the Seas. Great cruise line and great ships doing the Med. I also cruised the Western Mediterranean to Spain, Portugal, Gibraltar and the Canary Island on the Norwegian Gem about 2 years ago. I have been on 8 NCL cruises and about 10 Royal Caribbean cruises and favor RC hands down.
I loved NCL until I did some other cruise lines and they started the “freestyle” cruising. We had a problem with service on our last couple NCL cruises and found them unresponsive to our concerns when we sent them a letter of concern. We also experienced the same problems with dinner seating that you allude to. On days when the ship was in port getting a table was not much of a problem as long as we got to the dining room as soon as it opened. But on “at sea” days when everyone was on the ship at the dinner starting hour, everyone wanted to go eat at the same time. There were lines and on one cruise they actually gave us a buzzer, like at a restaurant, so they could call us when a table was ready, and we were just a party of two. We did not like the fact that we got a different table and waiter each evening so there was no opportunity to establish rapport.
If you like the idea of going to dinner whenever you want you can now do that on Royal Caribbean ships as well as all other cruise lines. All of the other lines have different names for it but its the same thing. On RC they call it My Time dining and this is from their web site:
“Just like dining at a favorite restaurant back home, our My Time Dining program allows you to enjoy the fine quality, ambiance and friendly service of dinner in our main dining room, while pre-reserving the perfect seating times (between the hours of 6:00 and 9:30 PM*) during your cruise vacation. To ensure prompt service, reservations for each evening are strongly encouraged. Since demand for seating in the main dining room varies nightly, and can increase significantly following evening shows, please reserve your preferred dinner times as early as possible. If you’ve already chosen the My Time Dining option for your cruise, you can select specific days and times here: Reserve My Time Dining Days and Times ”
So you don’t have to do Norwegian just to get the dining freedom.
If you are cruising on RC’s Splendour of the Seas, it is one of RC’s older Vision Class ships but it is nice. We cruised on it a couple years ago. The Vision of the Seas is the same class of ship. I would prefer the Brilliance over both of them. If you are cruising on NCL’s Gem, we cruised the Western Med on it the year it was launched and it was OK but I liked RC’s ships better.