Hawaii Online

NCL America, Norwegian Cruise Line’s American brand operates a single ship, the Pride of America, exclusively on inter-island cruises.  The brand was created in 2005 to provide 7-day cruises that started in Honolulu and visited Nawiliwili, Kauai; Kahului, Maui; Hilo, Hawaii; and Kona, Hawaii.  These itineraries were created to add time in ports and remove the 3-day roundtrip to Kiribati that were required of foreign-built ships.
The Pride of America was the first large, newly-built US-flagged cruise ship to be built in fifty years.  The ship’s crew, per U.S. law, is primarily American laborers, which is an exorbitant cost relative to international crews on other Norwegian Cruise Line ships.

However, to this day, the Pride of America is the only ship offering 7-day cruises in Hawaii without a foreign port of call, a large competitive advantage over other cruise lines that begin voyages in California and include Mexico in the itinerary.  At one point, two other NCL ships were in the Hawaii fleet with American crews: Pride of Hawaii and Pride of Aloha, although those two ships were re-flagged and returned to the international fleet following a softening of the Hawaii cruise market.  Nonetheless, the increase in the inter-island cruise industry has also led to an increase in Honolulu
rentals, used for pre- and post-cruise packages.