robotpony

We sail out of Vancouver regularly, most recently in April. We have experienced check-ins that were under and hour, and a few that were closer to two hours. Overall the experience is similar to Ft. Lauderdale on a busy day. The big caveat being that the customs line can be slow if understaffed, but it's usually better than the customs line at Vancouver airport. There have been some signage issues in the past, but we found in April that there were enough staffs and signs that people were flowing into the security line without issue. For anyone with mobility issues, there is a separate line that goes much faster (it was to the left of the main queue in April). We travel with friends that have mobility issues, and they always beat us on to the ship. Port staff should be able to help folks find the mobility line. You may also find that the port is busier in the mornings as most people ignore their boarding times. If you can skip that early rush, you can cut the boarding time in half or more.

We love booking early for the early booking bonus, selection of cabins, and to help us focus our savings on traveling more. We have 4 cruises booked currently, and will likely book another when onboard in September.

We have found a few benefits to booking onboard: Smaller deposits. On our recent cruises, HA has been running promotions onboard with $100/$200/$300 deposits (7 day/14 day/21+). Future cruise credits. Additionally the FCCs are a nice bonus, in addition to cruise credits from our TA and shareholder benefit. We usually net $500-1000 in OBC. 90 day booking bonuses. The onboard agents are great at suggesting cruises that are still within the 90 day booking window, which nets even better bonuses, like the Elite drink package, better wifi, OBCs, and prepaid gratuities. Combined with the smaller (and refundable) deposits, there is very little risk in booking cruises into 2025, at a vastly reduced rate. Knowledge. We also find that the onboard agents know the ships well and are great at finding rooms we might otherwise miss. Our TA does well with this, but the onboard staff are much more knowledgable, especially with the differences between each ship. On our next cruise, for example, we snagged a veranda class room with a larger deck for the same price as an inside cabin. Our own TA was surprised at the rate and location. The onboard staff are also good at finding special itineraries, and suggesting back-to-back combinations that fit our cruising style. We discovered several itineraries that we would not have thought of ourselves, including Antartica (2025), Voyage of the Vikings (2024), and an Eclipse cruise to Mexico (2024). Note: the offers do change from cruise to cruise and are especially good around holidays like US Thanksgiving.

After using Starling on the Koningsdam in April, I am much more likely to buy an internet/wifi package on future cruises. It was available almost all of the time, and was able to stream video for the elite tier guests (and Facebook/Instagram for standard users). Apple messages and email worked well too, and web browsing (other than filtered sites) worked well. My phone was able to keep photos sync'd and well, which is my main concern when away from service areas. For future cruises we're trying to book within 90 days of itineraries listing, which gets you elite wifi and drinks (and currently also includes gratuities). The bundled prices, for the advanced bookings are fantastic value in my opinion.

The miso soup in Nami/Tamarind has been outstanding (NS, and K), and has a smoky bonito edge. It may be the best miso soup we've had, and we eat a lot of Japanese food. Dive in burgers, when made properly, are excellent. We had one cruise (NS in November) where they were weirdly bad, but on all other HA cruises they've been fantastic. The fries are also great on the cruises we've been on. The curry dog was also weirdly great, and the other dogs taste good but are too messy for me. The curries in the Lido (port side, at one end of the far away lands station) were fantastic on our last few cruises. Lots of other gems in the Lido, too. The lobster Mac at the Pinnacle, the wedge salad w/blue cheese, and the creme brûlée have always been excellent.

I'll clean it up a bit and make a public version this week (it's a bit of a mess outside of those columns).

It seemed high to me too, so it's possible that my sample data was wrong or dissimilar to the other examples. I was going to check with my TA to see if they had access to better rates.

Space per PAX is important, but also staff:PAX ratios, which relates to service levels. I put a spreadsheet together last year to compare prices, space, service, and ratings between the major cruise lines for bookings 1 year in advance for veranda (or ocean view) style rooms, with similar bookings (mostly Alaska itineraries, but a few Caribbean as those lines had nothing comparable). Numbers were pulled from two reference sites where possible, and bookings were not logged in (so no extra discounts applied). You can see that space differs by a factor of two between all lines (~30 square feet to ~60 per person), and staffing similarly (.3 staff per person to .7). Prices, on the other hand, have a much wider range (up to 10x different, $120pp CAD to $1500pp CAD). You can see all of the major lines cluster around the middle of the pack, and pricing ($200-$240 per person per night, without discounts). Most of these lines offer 50-75% discounts on these prices for early and late bookings, or other special discounts. Prices include drink packages where available. Ships were picked based on rough size and comparable features, but as you can see there is a wide variance in ship type (so the findings will be skewed where ships are less comparable). My conclusion was that the major lines are following a similar formula, and the upper/lower contenders had more unique businesses. We have our next few cruises booked, but based on what I learned here we will be branching out over the next few years once we reach 4 star on HAL. RC and Virgin top our list, but the other bolded lines are also interesting, so we'll see how each line does over the next few years. Comparing review scores was less fruitful, but roughly follows space and staffing ratios. I found the quality of reviews on the major sites to be inconsistent and arbitrary, so will drop that from future versions of the sheet.

On our last 18 days (April), we waited for the MDR twice, and it wasn't really that big of a deal. We grabbed a pager and grabbed a drink at the ocean bar. Before finishing our table was ready. Other nights we just walked in. November/December last year was about the same, a few nights with a pager, the rest were fine. We mostly time our MDR (or Lido) meals for when it's not as busy, or we're good to wait. Most land-based restaurants get busy too, so it doesn't seem like a big deal to us.

If you're lucky they might still have some of the Holland America 150th gin still, which was an above average balanced gin (not far from Aviator or Hendricks). Most of the ships have Hendricks and Bombay Sapphire as well, and occasionally a few brands like Empress (when on the West coast of North America at least).

I crave the Pinnacle wedge salad w/blue-cheese dressing and get it every time. Luckily I have a smaller appetite, and that plus a strip, and dessert is way more than enough for me. My partner usually also gets the upcharge lobster Mac, which we take back to the room every time (to snack on later with left over steak).

We also found the local WIFI access to be good everywhere in the ship. It's possible that some devices have lesser WIFI hardware, which would translate into a different experience for those folks. There are a dozen factors in how well your device behaves on WIFI, but on our newer hardware it was pretty amazing on the Koningsdam in April.

And if you happen to rent a cabana from The Retreat, they will have 1 glass bottle for you per day.

We have heard back on almost all of our feedback, usually from the person receiving it. We have even had a few phone calls to the room following up when providing positive feedback for higher level staff members.

We also did not find any classical music on the Koningsdam in April, but there was a good amount of high quality live jazz music that we found quite enjoyable. There was some solo jazz piano, focused on older pieces too.

We found that the window loungers emptied out in the afternoon, which is when we tended to spend time there (on the Pinnacle class ships at least). They were building a new library on the Koningsdam in dry dock this year (which wasn't quite finished yet, but I expect it will be for our next cruise), and I believe there is one on the Rotterdam already. The classroom area was heavily used on our last cruise too, and people seemed to love the various classes there.There were a dozen different classes over the 18 day cruise we took in April, all were fully booked. I know people make fun of HA's "colouring" classes, but they have been well attended in our limited experience.

Also seems fair to us. We tend not to ask much of our TA unless it's an area we haven't traveled to before, and for those cases it seems like a good tradeoff to us.

I did not know this. We use a TA, but tend to book our next cruise while on a cruise, usually ~2 years out for the early booking benefits. We do this mostly to get the itineraries and rooms we want, but I'm curious what the savings would be and will have to look into it. So far the "inconvenience" of having a TA has not affected our cruise travels, though the primary value we find from them is in planning the book-end flights, hotels, and suggestions about excursions and locations. We see less than 5% in OBC from our TA generally, and usually a bottle of bubbly in the room. They have been very helpful in picking rooms and floors on various ships, as well as booking cabanas and monitoring price drops.

The feature is well staffed, too. We have used it a number of times to provide both positive and less positive feedback and have been notified of followups, remediation, and gratitude (especially when providing positive feedback on individuals).

So far we have enjoyed every Pinnacle class cabana we've had. We have been in #7 and #20 on the Koningsdam. I'm not a huge fan of the ones towards the entrances (door sounds, people asking questions). 7 through 4 and 16 through 19 have nice views are are quiet. The family cabana's in the corners are lovely, but expensive. The aft facing set are great if you want to mingle with the Cabana folks.

Yes. Both have signs and are roped off, to encourage privacy. In April of this year #22 was being used for storage (and I'm pretty sure it was storage in August 22 too).

Wondering this also. We will arrive by taxi May 28 departure on Noordam. Yes, Ubers, Taxis, and car services drop off in P1 by the porters. From there you follow the signs behind the porters.

There were also a number of EXC talks about Hawaii that were interesting (about ports, excursions, and culture).

11AM would be cutting it too close for us, and the HAL airport transfer can be quite slow. It's anywhere from 30-60 minutes from the cruise port to the airport, and it can take 30-45 minutes to get out of the cruise port. Check in and security at Vancouver airport can take anywhere from 15 minutes to 200 minutes, depending on the day, so I recommend arriving 3 hours for international flights on any commonly busy days. Assuming the worst and assuming you disembark at 9AM, an afternoon flight (2-3PM) is the safest bet, or grab a room at one of the lovely hotels in the area and leave at your leisure the next day!

On our April Koningsdam trip, HAL had a much larger selection of acts on the main stage, including a new act, 3 different comedians, as well as many more of the EXC talks. It felt much busier than our last two Pinnacle class cruises, and much better staffed and stocked. In 18 days there wasn't a day where there wasn't a large selection of things to do on ship. Overall we're seeing improvements over the last year, which matches our experience with most of the hotels we stay at where service levels are also slowing returning.