Photo: NCLHELL/Twitter
For passengers aboard aNorwegian Cruise Lineship in Europe, the trip took a turn for the worse as soon as they stepped on the vessel — and only got worse from there.
While boarding for a two-week long voyage that was supposed to take them to the Netherlands and Iceland, among other stops, they were notified that their first port in Amsterdam was swapped with Normandy, France. However, upon arriving at their new destination, it was cancelled due to weather conditions.
“That was understandable,” Katasha Jones, who was on the ship with her boyfriend, Cody McNutt, tells PEOPLE. “We were upset that the itinerary had just changed twice, but that with weather, we’ll be understanding.”
Unfortunately, the cancellations didn’t stop there. About a week into their trip, after only making it to two of their planned ports, they were notified that the trip’s main attraction, Iceland, had been cancelled and replaced with more towns in Norway.
“Myself and my boyfriend were on this trip for Iceland, because that is quite a beautiful place to get to visit,” Jones, 24, explains to PEOPLE. “And in conversation with many other passengers, that was a similar sentiment from other people as well — that they there to go to Iceland. This is our Iceland trip. There was even a family on board that had Iceland family adventure T-shirts made up.”
NCLHELL/Twitter
To make matters worse, the towns that replaced their Iceland ports were tourist towns that had already closed for the season, according to Jones, who said in one port the only open attraction was a local grocery store.
“There was a restaurant that opened and all it was able to serve was frozen hamburgers,” she reveals. “That’s all he had. There was nowhere to get a cup of coffee. The main feature that was open was the grocery store.”
“To say that that’s equivalent to Iceland is a pretty far stretch,”she adds.
Broken toilet on Norwegian Cruise.NCLHELL/Twitter
Finally, the cruise announced they would be docking in Greenock, Scotland, which had been another replacement port.
“We woke up early, excited to get to go to shore to Scotland and tried to make the best of it,”Jones says, but as they approached the dock, a delay was announced. They waited an hour, passengers flooding the main atrium to wait for their chance to leave the ship.
“We can see the port,” Jones recalls, when suddenly the captain announced that due to “high winds and rough weather conditions” they would not be docking in Scotland. Passengers were in disbelief as they could look out and see that “the water was flat and calm.”
That is when the chaos began.
Norwegian Cruise Revolt.NCLHELL/Twitter
“At that point, as soon as the announcement turned off, was when that room erupted and people just lost it,” Jones says. “It’s the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
Protests followed, with passengers demanding refunds or to return to London so that they could disembark. Jones and McNutt, 31, decided to leave the ship once they docked at their next stop of Belfast, Northern Ireland.
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Letter issued to passengers following protests.NCLHELL/Twitter
When asked for comment, a spokesperson for Norwegian sent this same message to PEOPLE.
Jones said passengers were notified of the 25 percent discount on a future cruise as a remedy to their troubling experience, but that it “genuinely upset people more.”
“It sounds ridiculous coming out of my mouth,” she adds of recounting her experience aboard the ship. “And then I’m like, ‘Oh no, that’s really what happened.'”
source: people.com
