Cruise Norwegian - NCL Reviews

by Caffeinating

CruiseNorwegian is about selling things, not about helping you while on the cruise. It even requires an up-charge to use the in-app chat to get help or enquire about something CruiseNorwegian leaves ambiguous. (Up-charges are a typical and overly-common Norwegian Cruise Line feature, so no surprise here).

And... It’s slow, especially when it needs to access something off your phone.

Perfect example: it asked me if I liked CruiseNorwegian .... I inadvertently answered yes. This locked the phone for about 90 seconds, after which it asked me to write this review. About 30 more seconds of locked app later, I was able to start typing. (And this is with me having the premium WiFi/internet package, which cost so much, it’s embarrassing to mention).

I’m sure if I had said no to the “do you like CruiseNorwegian” question, I would have suffered no delay, because CruiseNorwegian would not dare ask me to enter a review.

Having said that, I was able to order a diving excursion, and a few hours later the tickets arrived at my stateroom... so it does appear CruiseNorwegian works for ordering things.

Just don’t expect it to help you become acquainted with the ship, nor current goings on, if you didn’t already know these things.

by Emberhard

It’s was nice being able to have the daily itinerary on my phone, and see info about some of the activities/locations but that was about the only useful thing it did right.
All over the ship and the itinerary it stresses making reservations for things, dining, shows, tenders etc. and to do so it always said to make those reservations in person, at a touchscreen kiosk, or with your stateroom TV.
“Well why not in CruiseNorwegian ?” I thought. Well it turns out some things you can reserve in CruiseNorwegian , and some things you can’t. Some things you can’t even find listed in CruiseNorwegian .
Seemingly random.
Practically useless.
Additionally when I tried to load my personal itinerary, it was a gamble as to if it would even load, and when it did, it was not correct.
Useless.
CruiseNorwegian would randomly log me out at least once a day, usually multiple times. Very stressful in the beginning of the trip when I still though CruiseNorwegian would be invaluable, and I could not recall my password, with no internet for a password recovery email.
Thankfully by the end of the trip I became an expert in my login credentials.
Pointlessly.
Because as I said.
CruiseNorwegian was nearly useless.

by Tap.Tap.Tap.

Sometimes updated isn’t necessarily better. Last year CruiseNorwegian worked on the Escape. This year on the Bliss it was useless. App crashes in the middle of use. Phone usually doesn’t work, calls go directly to voicemail, you rarely can have a 2 way conversation. Sometimes you need to restart app and clear cache to make a call. Sometimes loses connectivity in cabin (deck 11 midship so I don’t see why this should happen). CruiseNorwegian is almost useless for phone calls. ***NCL has some nerve charging $10 for something that shouldn’t even be a beta release***. Also NCL, you should be able to add people by stateroom and name, or issue phone numbers in advance. Once in the ship you need someone’s phone number to add them, but you need to make contact with them to get it.
On a side note, I notice many 5 star reviews are for the cruise line, not CruiseNorwegian . Please people you are skewing the rating for CruiseNorwegian. I had a great time too, but leave those 5 star reviews on a travel site, not for this crappy app!
WOULD BE NICE IF NORWEGIAN WOULD READ THESE REVIEWS AND FIX THIS CRAPPY APP. For a company that’s so attentive to their passengers, I’m surprised they ignore these.

by Billybobjoe4577

Half the time I can’t connect - not sure if it’s the Wi-Fi, but all passengers should have access to CruiseNorwegian at all times regardless of log in or Wi-Fi plan or age. It’s just to hard - I would rather carry a piece of paper with my calendar and a map of the ship.

Also, consider the video screens at the elevators - they are useless and hard to read/follow. Hate to compare cruise lines, but Princess seems to be the easiest and most intuitive with the medallions. Tracking family and friends, finding restaurants and shops on the ship with the giant, horizontal screens at the elevators, wearing your medallion instead of carrying a card - super easy.

by Regretful Jenna

I downloaded CruiseNorwegian so that my husband and I could text or call each other while on the ship. When downloading, you agree to access of your photos. Of course we did for texting purposes. I just got off the ship yesterday. My pictures were scanned and any picture made on the ship that appeared to be taken by their professional photographers, although they were not, obviously caused a red flag and ALL of my pictures for two days were deleted. We had a stranger make a picture of us instead of a grand chandelier on Deck 8 of the Breakaway, and it is clearly by a pedestrian because I have my backpack on my arm-this was not a professional picture, but because they obviously have a ship photographer use this location in the evenings, this flagged my pictures and all of my pics were deleted from the Virgin Islands as well as the next day at sea. These were priceless pictures from my honeymoon that I cannot get back. I will never sail with Norwegian again and I warn everyone about to do not download CruiseNorwegian!!!

by Scott1155

iOS 15.3.1, iPhone 12 Pro - CruiseNorwegian worked fine on land with good performance and no noticeable battery drain. I am currently on the NCL Bliss and I find CruiseNorwegian still works alright but it has very high battery drain for no apparent reason. At night my phone is fully charged and connected to the internet when I go to bed. When I wake up in the morning I find my battery sitting at about 49%. The first time it happened I thought it was a fluke, but it happens every night. When I investigate the issue I find the Norwegian app had 1 minute of screen on time and 9.5 hours of background activity. What is CruiseNorwegian doing in the background while I am sleeping? There is no way CruiseNorwegian needs to be doing anything in the background while CruiseNorwegian is not in use. This high battery usage is definitely a bug that needs to be investigated and resolved.

by Thier12345

App works pretty nice for the most part but some key functionalities are very buggy... I couldn’t complete online checkin using CruiseNorwegian because it erroneously was not checking off one of my sections as complete, even though I had entered all required fields and did not get error messages when submitting. I also booked dinner reservations weeks ago (or so I had thought) but CruiseNorwegian didn’t register them. I received neither error or confirmation messages. Navigating around CruiseNorwegian can also be very confusing at times... it’s not laid out very well. I’m pretty shocked that a big line such as Norwegian hasn’t made a user friendly app that actually functions as expected. Very frustrating experience. You know it’s bad when you call customer service and their own agents are telling you not to use their buggy app and do everything on a computer instead.

by CMFKeiley

CruiseNorwegian is junk and wasn't worth the $10 x 6 people to use. Here is the list of issues, but let me be clear its a great idea with a failed execution. Crashes all the time. Only works on boats wifi so you can do anything from shore to boat even with data. Calls wont answer most the time. Nothing has ratings and you cant rate the excursions either. Most people devices need to have CruiseNorwegian open to get notifications. Text and photos randomly double send. Time was never correct with “Boat time”. Thats just a few.
Fix your at NCL and this could be a great app other wise save the cash for a taxi to go see something.

by ME Fisherman

Great for watching schedule when it is working. On transatlantic cruise, they failed to update time or did not do so till late morning. With 5 time zones this is important. System kicks you out 2-3 times a day. If not used to CruiseNorwegian it is hard to find place to log off so when you think you have logged off, it continues to use your minutes. Large lines at internet help desk due to users losing minutes. In our case my wife lost over 200 minutes. One would think, since you need it on board, they would do a better job of keeping it updated.

by Living_simple

Other ships have handyphones. The other Norwegian ships have the old apps that kids with phones can use.
But this new app would not allow our 13-year-old to register. On top of that the ship has no back up plan (handyphones to rent). So it very much made for some bad days and time on ship when my kid either is unreachable and can’t be found, or I make him stay with us. Kids have phones and families communicate with phones. I want him to be able to hang with friends, but to be reachable for plans as a family. Find a way to make this work or we can’t go back.
The entire rest of the cruise/experience was great.

by Hankle1

The good is that CruiseNorwegian gives a great overview of whats on board the ship your on. I used to turn on the tv to see whats going on and to check my acct and such, but now I can find it all in the palm of my hands. CruiseNorwegian works through the ships wifi so you can see all this info wherever you are.

The downside of CruiseNorwegian is the messaging and talk which is a paid feature. My family all paid for thinking itd be a great way to stay in touch while at different areas of the ship. However it definitely needs improvment since its a paid service. I had problems hearing the ringer since many times theres enough ambient noise to drown the ringer out. The ringer isnt the normal ringer on my phone which is defintely loud and also vibrates. Also several times when my phone rang, I wasnt able to pick up from my home screen and could only hang up and dial back. NCL should definitely study and immitate how other chat apps such as LINE, wechat, or whatsapp implement their messaging and calling. I felt that NCLs first attempt at this felt like CruiseNorwegian is still in the beta stage and needs more debugging and refining. Hopefully some improvements will be made by the next time Im on board.

by Cpw0807

The issue really comes down to communication with NCL. The messages they send are a mixture of advertising (sign up for our credit card) and really important (your itinerary changed) but you can’t 1) delete them, 2) mark them read or unread, or 3) sort them in any way. On top of it all, messages in CruiseNorwegian ’s message center all say they were received the same day for me. The day isn’t the day I booked the cruise or downloaded CruiseNorwegian , so I have no idea what its significance is. I missed several really important messages because I had no “new” messages or way to see what was recent.

Additionally, getting to your edocs is much more awkward than it needs to be with the button placed in the very bottom corner of the check in page. Half the time when you try to go to them it takes you to your phone’s home page thinking you’re trying to swipe up.

Could be decent but it has serious issues with simple functions.

by Patstats

When I first started using CruiseNorwegian a few weeks ago, it was working fine. I’m stateside and not aboard ship. But these last few days, CruiseNorwegian crashes while looking up the available excursions. I select sort by port, and scroll through the list. When I get to a selection and want to find out more, CruiseNorwegian crashes. It’s annoying to have to start all over again each time I want to find out more. It makes me wonder how much worse it will be when aboard ship, especially after reading some of these reviews.

by Pizzahutisthebest

Let me start with the pro’s. For texting it worked GREAT!! It was a life saver for the 5 of us on a huge ship. Having the itinerary at your fingertips everyday to know what’s going on is wonderful as well as being able to keep up with your spending, or your kids spending, also a plus. Where it falls short, the phone option is spotty at best. While you can make reservations for some shows, you can’t for others and this gets confusing. Menus should be available for all the restaurants. This would be awesome. Description of shows would be a bonus as well. The other bad thing it is a battery drainer!! I had to charge my phone 2 times a day with that app running. I would still recommend CruiseNorwegian, especially for groups.

by Pharese In AZ

I have come to really appreciate using CruiseNorwegian- both before cruising and while aboard. However, there is one hiccup that never seems to get resolved when updates are run- every time it loads a screen where the “chat” feature appears in the corner it pops a message saying I’m “leaving CruiseNorwegian ” and click confirm or cancel. I always click cancel and I can stay on the screen I’m navigating, but it’s a pain to constantly have this happen. Are they ever going to fix this glitch?!

by Capt Catnip

Good features like showing my cruise account balance, my plans, and the ship's itinerary. Plus all the places to eat, be entertained, makes it really easy to find where to go. Very easy to book excursions. When CruiseNorwegian is working properly, it improves my cruise experience. Activate/deactivate internet packages, etc.

For the first several days of my cruise, the daily events/what's happening wasn't being updated so I had to take photos of the paper schedule to have it on my phone. Also CruiseNorwegian has problems logging in to my account if I switch from ship wifi to cellular. Has other issues loading data. The part of CruiseNorwegian that shows what's happening morning/afternoon/evening (the week view with tabs) was empty for the entire cruise.

Overall a must to have for NCL cruises. Good experience, just needs a few tweaks

by Nectarmaiden

So far CruiseNorwegian has been great and easy to use but there is one minor issue. I keep getting notifications that something needs my attention. When I open CruiseNorwegian , I see that I have a new message. However, when I open the messages I do not have any new messages, they are all old messages that I have already read. I wish there was a way to delete them once I’ve read them. Also the notification badge will not go away.

by DexRules1

Overall, CruiseNorwegian worked well and was a tremendous help to my group...being able to search through the restaurants was the biggest advantage to CruiseNorwegian (and being able to book reservations directly from it was supper convenient). Again, overall, extremely useful. One thing I used frequently while on my cruise was the “what’s happening” feature...this shows all of the things happening in the next 24 hours (I was constantly looking at it to see what options were coming up). The one thing I didn’t like about this feature is that you can’t tap an item and get more information...that would have been EXTREMELY useful because some titles didn’t lend themselves well to what that event actually was. Another change I’d like to see (and some others have said the same thing) are menus for all restaurants...most have “sample menus” (which is better than nothing), but some don’t have anything so you don’t really know what they serve.

by DKD12123

If you are going to cruise with Norwegian, CruiseNorwegian will make planning much easier. Clear descriptions and/or instructions for everything on and off board.

But don’t get this mixed up with their other app that can be used on the ship while you are at sea and need to communicate with other members in your group. This a per person pre paid, on ship communication is called “concierge” and it is a downloadable app.

by Bobinps

The title summarizes my thoughts. I just downloaded it last night and I like it much better than the website. However, I think the organization could be improved tremendously by simply offering categories, such as:
Excursions, offer a filter by Port or by activity level
Food, offer a filter for cost or complementary, also to filter restaurants that are participating with the food package purchase

by Comet353

NCL needs to really work on with improving this application. The on-ship communication which they charge you extra for works about 30% of the time. I want refund. Application does not properly integrate with iOS to provide notifications. You have to open CruiseNorwegian constantly to check for messages even when it is properly on ship WiFi. The calling feature occasionally works. Half the time it errors out and sometimes will call a cabin, but calling another guest with application never worked. NCL FIX your application. You owe me credit.

by JoyJoy88

But ... has a few bugs to fix: first of all it was very difficult to register. Then had to turn off app then back in to be able to log in to confirm I had finally registered. Keeps trying to redirect me “outside CruiseNorwegian ” for what I believe is a credit card application which I did not request. When I booked shows, redirected me to a blank page. I knew i had a reservation thanks to the email. Too much scrolling to find airline and flights. Easier if one could simply type airport and airline codes.

by HumbertoThang

I love the concept of CruiseNorwegian being able to know what is going on each day on the ship and and making reservations for dining and etc. but there is a flaw I had when I went on the Norwegian Breakaway back in July 2019. I didn’t receive any notifications such as messages and phone calls from my family. I only received them when I had CruiseNorwegian open. Checked notification settings and made sure it was on but nothing. They need to fix it.

by Picbond

Thank you Andrea Howard (NCL agent) for being such a sweet kind person, great personality and wanting only the best for your travelers...You made my first cruise beyond blessed... Everyone on board was so happy to help in any way they could and wanted all travelers to have the best experience possible..We have made many friends with the great staff at bars, restaurants etc and look forward to seeing you again in February...