Norwegian Escape

Deck 8 is the reason posters keep steering balcony bookers upward on Norwegian Escape: it holds the shops, bars and restaurants, so deck 9 cabins sit directly over them. The most-upvoted reply in a 2016 deck-9-or-deck-12 thread took 12 without hesitation because decks 11 and 13 are all cabins, and a second poster booking a mid-ship interior on 12 gave the same reason. Forward deck 9 was the exception noted, since there are cabins below it at the bow, with the trade-off that far-forward rooms are a long walk to the central stairs. Noise from above worries posters more than noise from below: a 2024 honeymooner who booked 9306, one floor up from Cagney's, was told in the top reply that it is the quietest restaurant on the ship, and another reply described sleeping directly beneath a pizza venue open until 3 a.m. and hearing only chairs slide on one rough-sea night. The one deck-5 report was a 2016 guarantee assignment to 5122, near the theater and the Supper Club a deck up; the advice was that the phone center cannot move a guarantee cabin but the front desk on board sometimes can.

Category upgrades on this ship come down to bathrooms and spa access rather than location. Two threads (2019 and 2020) agreed that a mini-suite, now sold as a Club Balcony Suite, is a balcony cabin with a tub-and-shower bathroom in place of the phone-booth shower, plus small perks like a bag of laundry; one poster with a quiet balcony not under anything decided location mattered more. Spa Balcony cabins are the same room with a thermal-suite pass attached, worth roughly $300 per person for a week in 2023, and both 2023 spa-bid threads leaned toward simply buying the pass, especially on a port-heavy New England run with one sea day, though one bidder did win the upgrade for less than the pass costs and the passes are known to sell out. A 2023 reply cautioned that bid-upgrade rooms are whatever locations were left after everyone else chose, and another had found that phoning NCL for an upgrade was cheaper than bidding on a sibling ship. Paying $600 to move to an aft balcony was judged not worth it in a 2019 thread; upgrade-bid emails were reported arriving around 80 to 90 days before sailing.