Alpaca is in the Mood to Hula!

Alpaca spent the holidays cruising through the warm waters of Hawaii on NCL's Pride of Aloha (for cruise information, schedules and itineraries, see www.ncl.com), visiting each of the Hawaiian islands. While Alpaca had a delightful time at shore in Hawaii, he was not impressed by NCL or by Pride of Aloha. In the Alpaca's mind, the ship has nothing to be proud of.

Unlike other ships, the Pride of Aloha is staffed entirely by Americans. While it is nice that everyone speaks the same language, it was abundantly clear that nobody had prior cruise ship experience. As a consequence, service was slow and usually deficient, with mediocre dinners taking 2-3 hours, much of the time spent waiting - and waiting - and waiting for service, problems were not immediately or satisfactorily resolved and, frankly, nobody seemed like they were working very hard at all. The ship experienced some serious plumbing issues, which resulted in the Alpaca's exceptionally small stateroom smelling like sewage for four of the seven days of the cruise. The Alpaca actually wanted to vomit at the smell. The crew did little to correct the plumbing problems or the stench in our stateroom. The stateroom itself was unusually small, even for a cruise ship cabin, and the condition was not impressive. Things had obviously been done in the cheapest manner possible. The stateroom did not even have real soap - just the crap dispensed in public restrooms across the country. The beds were hard - we joked that if there were enough room on the ground, we would have been more comfortable there. The pillows were like bricks, and the two coupled together ensured that we would need daily massages. The stateroom attendant was equally deficient, as we failed to receive our Latitudes brochures, turndown service was not done on a regular basis, we often did not have a daily schedule, our belongings were routinely moved and examined and three items that were in a sealed clear bag (with other items) went missing from our stateroom. To NCL's credit, security took a report and stated that they would reimburse us for the missing items, but it was nonetheless disconcerting to have an experience like this.

Pride of Aloha did very little right. Alpaca recommends Hawaii, but does not recommend this cruise.

College Street, Spiffed Up

It's trying to impress the Alpaca. It doesn't need to try that hard. It's pretty cute.