romet

Thank you, BermudaBound, for your very thoughtful reply. It was really inspiring to read your detailed comments, particularly your screen prints of available cruises - are those available to everyone on line, or do you need specialist credentials? Unfortunately, those other cruises are showing full, so we will keep our fingers crossed to sail on Koningsdam. We obviously need more training on booking cruises and extracting more web information. Looking forward to your next seminar, and thanks again.

But what do you get when you sign up for the standby deals? A promise of a cheaper cruise, but that comes with the great unknown or whether you will get to take the trip of a lifetime. Is it worth it in the great scheme of things - I doubt it. We subscribed to Koningsdam on August 24, but this and most other Alaska cruises are already sold out. So what are the odds of taking this cruise, or should we be looking at plan B? So today we called Holland America to try and find out our odds of travelling. We asked could they tell us what position on the list we were, but nobody would tell us anything. “That information is not available.” So, HA is playing the cards close to their chest, and not helping the passengers who have made a commitment. They could have given us a little hope, but chose not to. So we are now stuck, something which we did not consider when we took the bait. We can’t book another vacation because we might still get to go on this cruise. I doubt we will gamble on a standby cruise again.