tooleyweeds

On the Noordam R6L cruise 5/21-5/28, they had a loud contemporary band in Rolling Stone Lounge, a good jazz trio at the Ocean Bar twice nightly, a piano/singing duo at Billboard Onboard (the female in the duo can't sing), and a dance team on World Stage (didn't sample this one).

No. Sorry. The gist was this (I think 🙂 ): About 36 hours before disembarkation, HAL issued color-coded and number-coded luggage tags to passengers with HAL transfers. Luggage had to be in the hallway by midnight the morning of disembarkation. I think the first passengers off the ship were those without HAL transfers, who wrangled their own luggage. There were multiple (I don't know how many) "muster" points for passengers with HAL transfers. Upon arrival at your "muster" point, you were supposed to check in with the HAL officer stationed there. The officer was responsible for "all present and accounted for". At my World Stage "muster" point, passengers were staged to meet there at about 10 different 15 minute intervals. Mine was the last, scheduled for disembarkation at 9:45, but actually left World Stage at about 10:45(?). The passengers in each fifteen-minute group were designated by color and number (Red 1, Red 2, Blue 1, Blue 2, Yellow 1, Yellow 2, etc.), corresponding the the luggage tag colors and numbers we'd been given for our luggage. I was Yellow 4.

The spruce pollen was everywhere. I think that's what got to me, but it could also have been the woman hunched over in the Explorer Lounge hallway with a racking cough and the look of impending death, or it might have been the chorus of coughers who greeted me in the Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center movie theater. I should have thought twice about staying in that theater for 20 minutes!

I don't know. This was our first cruise, so we had nothing to compare it to. Seemed like a logical approach to me, given that different gangways were being used to disembark different passenger groups with different next destinations and schedules. We were in the last group off the ship, likely because our flight home was next day. [Note that I'm using "muster point" here as a term of convenience -- not related to the emergency muster points assigned at the beginning of the cruise.] From what I've read here about embarkation in Vancouver, that process would benefit from enforcement of the same chunk-by-chunk approach that this disembarkation utilized.

DW and I participated in the Noordam disembarkation that the OP describes. (I even coughed once or twice, but more about that in another post.) We thought disembarkation was well-organized, though it did not run on schedule. I've no idea what held things up onshore, if anything. Onboard, passengers were failing to check in at the World Stage muster point to which we were assigned (same as OP), causing the HAL agent there to repeatedly call out missing room numbers and to issue general PA announcements. I expect that was happening at other muster points as well, and contributed to some delay. Along the route from the World Stage to our particular bus, there were monitors stationed at intervals restating our disembarkation group. Each was polite and not condescending. We thought HAL organized it well and that some passengers failed to execute for whatever reason.

If the rock slide in Skagway continues to interfere with the dock for larger ships, choosing a smaller HAL ship could be an advantage. Noordam gets to use the small-ship berth on my upcoming trip. If two larger ships are scheduled for Skagway on the same day, they are time-sharing the dock below the rock slide.

Thank you!

Thank you!

Thank you! I think that pdf will answer my questions. I had been on that FAQ page yesterday, but went right to the search box, overlooking the link to the pdf. I enjoyed your live review last year when we were deciding which tour to take.

DW and I are doing the 11-night Seattle Double Denali (R6L), starting May 17 with an overnight in Seattle, followed by a flight from Seattle to Anchorage on May 18 for the land portion. The cruise portion starts in Whittier on May 21. I've read in other threads that a small suitcase and a small hand-carryon are good choices for the land portion, and that a more substantial suitcase can be dedicated to packing for the cruise portion. Does that plan work for our itinerary? How do our suitcases for the cruise portion get to Whittier from Seattle? Do we just turn them over to HAL in Seattle?

Thank you.

Thank you.

Virgin cruiser here. What is "CO"?

Thank you for this very informative series of posts. On the McKinley Explorer Dome Train, who gets to sit on the upper (dome) level? Is that determined by the cabin class that you choose for the cruise?