{"id":4213,"date":"2010-10-26T01:03:03","date_gmt":"2010-10-26T08:03:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cruisingdoneright.com\/?p=4213"},"modified":"2010-10-26T01:03:03","modified_gmt":"2010-10-26T08:03:03","slug":"new-ships-norwegian-freestyle-cruising-meyer-werf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/?p=4213","title":{"rendered":"Norwegian stepping up to the plate"},"content":{"rendered":"

We’d been gone a long time. Too long. Nobody who enjoys cruise ships as much as we do should ever have gone years between cruises, and we did. Norwegian brought us back.<\/p>\n

Two words was all it took to get us back on board \u2014 freestyle dining.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>NCL<\/a> calls it Freestyle Cruising now (the capitals, FC, probably means it’s copyrighted) but we remember it as “dining” (no caps) because that was the key word for us.<\/p>\n

When we’re on land, which believe it or not is probably more than you think, our idea of dining can be 4 p.m., it can be 9 p.m., or it can be anywhere in between. Our idea of dining is “just the two of us” after it changed from being “just the five of us” and, although we’re not anti-social, most times that’s the way we like it.<\/p>\n

Before Norwegian crept into our cruise consciousness, our impression was that you had to designate a specific dinner time in advance, maybe sit with the same people every night, sometimes in tuxedos and dresses. That wasn’t us, and NCL came to the rescue.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Today, NCL is creeping into every cruiser’s consciousness with yesterday’s announcement that it will build two more big ships which, by 2014, will expand the Norwegian fleet to 13.<\/p>\n

The unnamed and non-described ships (see artist rendering) will be built by Meyer Werft<\/a>, a well-known yard in Germany where big ships are put together in an extravagant way.<\/p>\n

This is significant for two reasons. One reason is that four of Norwegian’s ships \u2014 all of them in the Jewel Class \u2014 were built at Meyer Werft. And the Epic<\/a>, NCL’s new mega ship, was not. The four Jewel ships are popular with its Latitudes members, as loyal customers are called, while the jury is still out on the Epic, which had a myriad of problems during its construction in France. Secondly, Celebrity’s<\/a> four highly-regarded Solstice Class ships came out of the same yard, and so did the Disney Dream<\/a>…or it will on Saturday.<\/p>\n

The project is going to cost Norwegian $1.67 billion and, yes, that’s a lot of dinero, freestyle or not. The fact that the cruise line is willing to make that kind of investment in a discretionary industry in “this economy” is a good sign for all of us, cruisers or not.<\/p>\n

When we started doing research so that we could write this blog, it was suggested to us that Norwegian was considered to be very middle-of-the-road by veteran cruisers. With the 4,100-passenger Epic this year and two more ships of approximately the same size on the way, not to mention 44 years in the business, Norwegian is becoming something special.<\/p>\n

That’s what we thought when NCL brought us back to cruising.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We’d been gone a long time. Too long. Nobody who enjoys cruise ships as much as we do should ever have gone years between cruises, and we did. Norwegian brought us back. Two words was all it took to get us back on board \u2014 freestyle dining. NCL calls it Freestyle Cruising now (the capitals,… Continue reading Norwegian stepping up to the plate<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,25,19,15],"tags":[138,231,48,29,151,126],"class_list":["post-4213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cruise-industry-news","category-people","category-ships","category-stories","tag-celebrity-cruises","tag-dining-on-ships","tag-disney-dream","tag-epic","tag-new-cruise-ships","tag-norwegian","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4213"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4213\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}