You did not compare that price with the “Free at Sea” promo. They always have that promo going on.
Yes, I did. The "Free at Sea" promotions are largely BS. The "free open bar" promotion requires that you prepay 20% gratuities on drinks that you *might* have. For a 10-day cruise and 2 people, that came to $436. That's *a lot* of drinks. And if you don't drink alcohol, then you can't downgrade to the free soda package without paying the full price. Further, everyone in the stateroom has to have the same package, so if only one person drinks alcohol, then you're out of luck. There's no way I'd ever spend $436 on drinks in 10 days. DCL has free soda. NCL charges $3 + 20% gratuity.
The "free WiFi" promotion only gives you 2.5 hours of slow-speed WiFi for the 10-day cruise. That's 15 minutes a day. If you want unlimited WiFi, then it's $199 per person. I can't seem to upgrade only one person, so that's $400 total. Disney charges $20/day for unlimited WiFi, which is half the cost, though it does require sharing the connection since only one device can use it at any time.
The "free specialty dining" promotion once again adds a pre-paid gratuity to your balance and is therefore not free. It was only something like $36 for two meals, which isn't much, but also isn't free as advertised. Upgrading to two more meals is another $70 per person, plus gratuities, which is close to Palo prices. I can't judge the quality of the food since this is my first NCL cruise.
Finally, the "free excursions" aren't free. You actually get a $50 coupon toward one excursion at each port for the first guest in the stateroom. The other guests get nothing. So, there are no free excursions. I can't see what will be available since this cruise isn't until 2024, but using the NCL website to look at what's available in Bermuda, I can see that some excursions are priced similarly to DCL's offerings and some are higher. There are 5 ports on my cruise, so this is a $250 discount, assuming we book an excursion through NCL at each port and that the costs for those excursions isn't more than I would pay with DCL. Unlikely.
I think the large savings with NCL and the others come from guests 3 and 4, which are often "free" on these other lines, but not on DCL. Since I travel with just my wife, I don't benefit from those savings. For just the two of us, the cost of this NCL cruise is just a bit less than I would pay with Disney for a much smaller room, a much less appealing ship, and much less entertainment.
And by the way, NCL has other costs to consider. The pre-paid gratuities, which apparently just go to everyone on the service team, are $20/day per person, which is higher than DCL's pre-paid rate. There's no self-service laundry, so you have to pay the much higher prices to have the staff launder your clothes. Sure, you get one $30 bag halfway through the longer cruises, but it's a rather small bag and $30 would buy you five full loads of laundry on DCL. Gratuities are automatically added to every drink that you buy, including soda, and are set at 20%. If you want to access the nicer sundeck, then you have to pay for a pass. If you want to eat at most of the restaurants, then you have to pay.
And you get less, too. There seems to be exactly one Broadway-style show for the 10-night cruise, plus a dinner show with dancers, if you can get a reservation (at least it's free!). The rooms are much smaller, most of them don't have bathtubs, and none of them have split bathrooms. The kids club is much smaller than the DCL clubs. There are no character meets, no character shows, and no fireworks. The website doesn't really talk about what else there is to do all day. I'm hoping that they have something like the crafts, trivia, and cooking classes that DCL offers. Otherwise, I guess there is an arcade and a sports area with ropes. Those sound fun. I'd rather that they delete the casino, though.
Oh, and everything about NCL seems shady. They offer CruiseFirst certificates, where you pay $150 and get a $300 credit toward a future cruise. But, you don't get a refund if you don't use it. And when you try to use it, it doesn't work and you have to call them. Why? Dunno. Just because, I guess. And then they advertise stuff like "2nd guest is free" as if it's a special sale, but that's nonsense. You're going to pay the same fare for one or two guests anyway, so I guess the 2nd guest is always free. They also say things like, "only two days left for this promotion!", but then two days later, they have exactly the same promotion again. You only get 14 days to transfer a cruise to a
travel agent instead of the 30 days that DCL gives you. If you've paid in full, but later qualify for a discount because of a group rate or something, then you just get another credit toward another cruise instead of getting your money back. All of that on top of the sneakiness of the "free at sea" promotions and the built-in gratuities for everything. I'm not a fan.
