Understanding Norwegian’s “Free at Sea”

Are you finally ready to take that first cruise with Norwegian Cruise Line? If so, you may be wondering exactly how their Free at Sea program works and if it is worth the extra cost.

What exactly is Norwegian’s Free at Sea program?

Simply put, it is an additional cost add-on program that allows you to upgrade your cruise experience. There are four different things that you can add on through the Free at Sea program: Drinks, Specialty Dining, Excursion discount, and Wifi. 

The excursion discount and wifi automatically come with Free at Sea, but you will need to choose whether you also want to add on Drinks and/or Specialty Dining. Let’s break each one of these down though.

Free Wifi

The wifi you get with the Free at Sea is the basic, not-for-streaming wifi. Each person will get set amount of minutes to use. 75 minutes for a 3-6 night cruise, 150 minutes on a 7-11 night cruise and 300 minutes for more than 12 nights. They say this is up to a $200 value, but I’m not sure how they figure that out since the wifi packages you can purchase are unlimited minutes. The wifi is fairly easy to use by logging in through NCL while onboard. You will need to choose to use your minutes, so you can’t accidentally log on, but you will need to make sure you remember to log off when finished online. 

I got quite a big bang for my buck by logging into Twitter, letting it load, then logging off the wifi. I could then read though my Twitter feed while offline. I couldn’t comment, or click to read comments, but it was a good way to scroll through your feed without wasting minutes. 

The Excursion Discount is mislabeled when going onto NCL’s site since they list it as FREE excursions under their Free at Sea page. No. You get $50 off ONE person for each excursion booked. Let me tell you, every single excursion I looked at was more expensive when booked through Norwegian than through one of the excursion sites that work with local groups, even with the $50 off. It wasn’t even close. So we didn’t use that $50. If you prefer to book through the cruise line, just be aware it is only $50 off per cabin, not per person.

Specialty dining

With your Free at Sea package you can choose to get one specialty dining experience per person, but it is not free. You will need to pay the 20% gratuity fee on what the dining would normally cost. So it is still quite a bit because specialty dining on cruise ships is just outrageous in my opinion as a budget cruiser. However, it is a cheaper way to try out those specialty restaurants. 

Drinks package

The main reason I believe most people choose the Free at Sea package is for the drinks. Like the dining add-on, the drinks package is an additional cost to what you’ve already paid for the Free at Sea. You will need to pay the gratuity fee of 20% of Norwegian’s Drinks package. And at $109 pp/day, their drinks package is one of the most expensive in the business. I cannot imagine that anyone actually buys it outright, and I suspect the reason it is as costly as it is, is due to 99.9% of people who want the drinks package just getting Free at Sea. Upping the cost of the drinks package means the 20% gratuity is higher, so they are still coming out ahead. That’s my opinion anyway. On a 7-day cruise, you can see that the gratuities for two people comes out to just over $300. When you combine that with the cost of the Free at Sea, you are talking around $240 each. At around $35 a day, that is still well-below most other cruise line’s alcoholic drinks packages. For reference, Carnival charges around $60 a day per person for their Drink package and Royal’s is around $80.

You will want to be aware that the drink package that comes with the Free at Sea does not include top shelf liquor, water bottles or specialty coffees, but it is unlimited and you can order two drinks at a time. 

Taking everything into consideration, I think that Norwegian’s Free at Sea is a great deal, and is one of the main reasons why I would sail on Norwegian again. Let me know in the comments if you have taken advantage of this program or if you have any questions about the Free at Sea program that didn’t get answered.