NCL Norwegian Honeymoon / Anniversary Package
For $79 you can get a Honeymoon / Anniversary Package -Sparkling Wine and strawberries in your stateroom upon embarkation
Canapés delivered to your stateroom one evening
Honeymooners' Champagne and Cake party
Honeymoon photograph
Romantic dinner for two in Bistro with a complimentary bottle of wine
I tried to price this out to see how much sense it makes. The first thing everyone says is that the canapes really are on the awful side. They involve seafood and are left in your room for hours before you find them. So let's discount those as non-edible.
The two Bistro dinners add up to $20 - they only give you the base level Bistro entrance which you then could pay up as usual. So let's say this is a $59 package without the dinner, to make calculations easier.
So the two main items left are the sparkling wine to start with, and the bottle of wine at dinner.
The cheapest sparkling wine they have is a cava (i.e. from Spain) - Segura Viudas which lists for $24 but is really around $10 in the real world.
On the wine side, their cheapest wines are $26 for a Greg Norman Cab-Shiraz which retails for $12.
That would add up to $50 total. If they're charging you $15 over retail anyway, then instead of dealing with a cheap probably not-great cava as my sparkling wine, I can get something rather nice from home and really enjoy it Let's take the Moet White Star as the Champagne that most US drinkers love. That is $32 a bottle in your store - or $54 on the ship. I really doubt they're giving you the white star as your room's wine - and if you bought it on the ship it'd be a $22 "corkage fee". So it's cheaper to bring it on yourself ...
Most people I talk to don't go to the party nor get the photograph. I don't think we would do either of those two things. So in essence the decision is about what to do with $59. You can pay them $59 and get a base-cheap cava sparkling wine, along with a base-cheap cab-shiraz, both at a corkage-fee price. On the other hand, you can get your own favorite sparkling wine or Champagne, and then get your own favorite wine, and pay the $15 corkage fee for both and have it end up with the same price break. If your personal favorites are in the $10-$12 range, you're at an even balance. If your personal favorites are more expensive, you start saving money because the corkage fee stays the same ($15 each) but the ship's markup on bottles keeps increasing by bottle price (the $22 fee for the Moet White Start).
Hawaii Photos and Trip Notes
Main Travelogue Listing