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.

Great comments on this thread for planning for an onboard Covid experience.  We enjoyed the cruise, but got hit with the sniffles on last night, and tested positive when we got home.

We didn’t hear the captain’s announcement about Covid.  We heard from other passengers about the  200 cases.  That is roughly 10% of the guests which should be enough to warrant a written advisory to every cabin to alert everyone about the situation.

Silent disco and martini bar were great fun, but probably where we met our fate.  The Equinox and Celebrity theatres were likely spreader events, so we avoided those.

We offer our sincere apologies to anyone we infected on the way home.  We did wear our masks at all times on the planes, so hopefully no casualties.

There is very little online information regarding the Covid incident rate on this ship.

We saw BB King for the first time on March 2015 Caribbean cruise, and they were the best: Tempest Barnes and Daryl had the crowd hopping. Then we saw Tempest again on the Rotterdam in October 2015 in a smaller band on the Mediterranean, where hardly anyone attended the Crow's Nest. She still puts on a good show, but the Daryl/Tempest combo was the best - just unbelievable. There is a Youtube video from Scott showing their March 2015 performance.