All our cruises have been Disney except for one Norwegian cruise on the Pearl to Alaska (before Disney went to Alaska.) I'm glad we did Alaska with Norwegian because we really wanted to experience Glacier Bay and Disney doesn't go there.
It was not the same as
Disney cruise. But it was a unique cruise for us because it was a cold destination (not the tropics) and that means lots of stuff was different. In particular, we were so engrossed by the inside passage sights and critters we saw off our balcony we were glad we did not have to eat at a specific time. We did miss getting to know our wait staff...the food service was impersonal and mediocre with the exception of the meal at the upscale Italian eatery which required an upcharge similar to Palo. We ate a lot at the food court just because we didn't want to be committed to a sit down meal when amazing things were floating by. And because it was June, it was broad daylight even at a later dinner hour and we were riveted to our balcony or the ship's upper balconies looking at the scenery, whales, grizzlies, etc. So that's not Norwegian's fault.
My kids, who were 13 and 16 at the time, LOVED the Norwegian experience. They literally roamed around in pods with other kids (by the way, it seems these pods get formed at the very first night of the cruise, so if your son or daughter misses that, they might find it harder to join an existing pod.) They weren't officially called pods, of course, but DH and I called them that because you'd see them schooling around the ship together, hanging out at the adult nightclubs during the day, or eating at the all hours sit down restaurant with their pod late at night! My kids were die hard Disney Cruise Oceaneer's Lab/Club/Edge/Vibe kids and they still say they enjoyed the teen scene on the Norwegian immensely, but they are also very socially outgoing and I suspect more subdued kids might not find it as wonderful as my two did.
I have two big caveats with Norwegian...and one was largely because it was an Alaskan cruise. The first is that people who had not spent the money on balcony cabins would set up camp in the food court dining area by the windows with board games, books, blankets, etc. all day on sea days. So when you wanted to eat in the food court, there were no tables to sit at. We often ended up having to carry our food back to our room. The Norwegian staff did not seem to discourage this at all.
The other BIG deal was the layout of our balcony cabin compared to the similarly featured cabin on any Disney ship. Instead of the bed/bunk for the kids being parallel to the long walls of the room as they are on Disney, on the Pearl they jutted out perpendicular to the long wall and completely blocked the sliding glass doors to the balcony. Unlike DH and me, my kids are night owls and were still sleeping in the morning long after we were up and about, and to get out on our balcony we'd have to literally climb over the end of the lower bunk and my daughter's feet while ducking under the upper bunk containing my son. Since only the room steward had the tool to lock the top bunk back into the ceiling, it was often well past midday when the bunk was finally out of the way...just a couple hours before the steward put the bunk back down again! For cruisers like us who spend A LOT of time on our balcony, having to navigate around that road block was a huge pain. We've passed the point of no return of sharing our stateroom with our kids (they now get their own) but if we were sharing on Norwegian again, we'd see if there were rooms other than suites that did not have that blocked balcony configuration. Of course, if it had just been the two of us, we wouldn't have noticed.
I think if we had never been on a Disney ship we would have thought it was great, but knowing what we know, it was impossible to stop constantly making comparisons where the Pearl tended to come up short. Just one example...in the atrium where they have a stage with live entertainers, they also had a two story screen with kids playing giant XBox video games...it was just chaos, no elegance whatsoever.
