The Schoolyear of Scott

For my first post regarding the cruise that I just returned home from, I would like to focus on Freestyle Cruising. “What”, you may be asking yourself right now, “is Freestyle Cruising?”. Let me enlighten, courtesy of Norwegian Cruise Line’s website, www.ncl.com:

With Norwegian Cruise Line, Freestyle Cruising® is all about flexibility and freedom. Freedom from stress. Freedom from schedules. Freedom to create your own vacation.

Sounds great right?  The ship that we went on, the NCL Spirit, had Freestyle Cruising.  I thought it would be interesting to delve a little bit deeper into what exactly Freestyle Cruising is vs. what NCL claims it is.

Let me preface this all by stating that I had a great time on the cruise, however it was more due to the group I was with than the ship.

From NCL.com:

On an NCL cruise, you can eat where you want, when you want, with whom you want. And with up to 13 different restaurants and dining rooms on board, you can certainly eat whatever you want.

This is a 100% truthful statement.  On our cruise, you were able to eat where you wanted, when you wanted and with whom you wanted.  But let’s break this down a bit further…

Eating Where You Want: Yes, there are 13 different restaurants on the ship, but what NCL.com fails to mention is that all but two of them require you pay an additional fee to eat there.  Want to eat sushi for dinner?  Great, but its going to be $15 per person to do so.

Eating When You Want: NCL.com fails to mention that the only way to eat whenever you want is via Room Service, as that is the only food service that is open 24 hours.  Even the “24 hour” buffet only served food between 6:30am-10:30am, 11:30am-2:00pm and 5:30pm-9:30pm.  I guess the beverage machines being turned on at all hours allows them to consider the buffet always open.  To eat at the specialty restaurants, NCL recommended that you make reservations as they were usually very crowded.  Having to make reservations, to me, doesn’t sound very freestyle.

Eating With Whom You Want: This is pretty much truthful, however we had a group of 22 and not one of the 13 restaurants had the ability to seat us at a table together.  I’ll give NCL the benefit of the doubt on that one since we did have a large party.

You can also dress the way you want and, at the end of your cruise, get off the ship whenever and however work best for you.

Lies.  There was a dress code at every restaurant and lounge (though, I guess you can wear whatever you want in your own cabin while eating room service).  And yes, you could get off the ship whenever worked best for you, but if you wanted to “walk-off” the ship (meaning, not having a scheduled debarkation time), you had to do so by 9am.  So explain to me how that is freestyle!

With up to 13 different bars and lounges, the nightlife is always hopping. Piano bars, cigar bars, espresso bars, wine bars, dance clubs – even private karaoke rooms where you can sing your heart out (and no one ever has to know if you’re tone deaf). We’ve got just about everything on board – except a schedule.

Every evening, the “Freestyle Daily” planner was delivered to our stateroom.  Included was a schedule of events for the day.  Now, granted, the schedule did come with a disclaimer that stated you could do as much or as little of this schedule as you want since it is “Freestyle”, but in reality, isn’t that the same for every cruise?  And all the bars and lounges have their ending time as “…whenever”.  Apparently in Freestyle, “…whenever” means midnight, as only the nightclub stayed open past 12am, and even that had last call at 1:30am.

As you can see, Freestyle Cruising was not all that it is cracked up to be.  A fun time was had by all, but no matter what NCL may claim, we did so by following a pretty strict schedule.

Tomorrow I will take a look at the Food & Service on an NCL Freestyle Cruise.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 6th, 2009 at 1:35 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.