Norwegian Sky

I travelled with NCL last year in Central America, Panama Canal etc and based upon my experience I booked the Canaries Cruise! Where do I begin. . . . . The first disaster struck when TAP airline lost our luggage between Gatwick and Lisbon!! The second disaster was that the trip to the Azores was cancelled due to a dockyard strike in Lisbon. The third disaster was the state of the Norwegian Sky. The most important point to make is that the Norwegian Sky is old and in a poor state. Dependant on my experience on this cruise I was planning to travel with NCL to Egypt and beyond on the Norwegian Sky, but not anymore. NCL must know how bad this ship is without the need for a survey. NCL need to take a long hard look at the Norwegian Sky to properly understand if the company wants this ship in their fleet and to represent what NCL stands for. NCL provided the NCL App for use and likewise reduced the amount of useful paperwork. The App was useful until I got onboard and realised that NCL have linked the App to the ship's WiFi system which means customers have to potentially pay extremely expensive WiFi fees to obtain the missing information. REALLY! Do they have to do this? If you then look at the electronic Notice Boards placed around the ship, these were frequently not fully up to date, and/or lacked information. The Balcony State rooms are expensive and yet hopelessly small at 18m2 with a poor layout and inadequate space to hang clothes and store luggage apart from under the bed. I defy anybody to take sufficient clothes for 2 weeks and be able to move safely around the Balcony cabin. The small size Balcony Rooms was the talk of guests around the ship. NCL describe the Balcony State rooms as 18m2 on their website and show a beautiful photo of a patio door arrangement. Only when you get onboard do you find out that the arrangement is in fact a porthole window and a single door, which is mentioned in the words. I believe this is clever marketing and a misrepresentation because in actual fact all Balcony cabins on Decks 9 &10 apart from Sail Away and Suites are the same size and have the same arrangement. You are only able to detect the room status indicator by going outside of the room and looking. Not great. NCL have installed bedhead lights above the bed where customers may want to sit back and relax. There is only one bedside cabinet because the rooms are too small to have two! NCL have provided a backbreaking stool to save space, and the lack of a proper chair again means you can't store anything like clothes on the chair back over night. The in-room TV service was intermittent at best. The shower is an old-fashioned curtain design and totally useless. The Garden Room buffet facilities are totally inadequately sized for the number of passengers onboard and this caused exceptionally long queues for food and then with nowhere to sit and eat. It turned into a 'free for all' chaotic experience with cold food as an end result. There was an inadequate supply of food because of the enormous volume of people and so things were constantly running out, and the staff could not clean the tables quick enough and so service ground to a halt. NCL have changed the mugs for cups meaning people had to keep revisiting the drinks station. Not a good experience.