After two HAL cruises...

[tine-tine]

What I do find a detriment to booking HAL is the fact they don't do 14 night cruises. We cruise Caribbean in January/February and the weather is too unpredictable at that time to duplicate the in/out schedule in the middle of the trip. We also do b2b for 28 nights and with HAL this could involve repeating the journey and the itinerary 4 times. The smoking policy, although improved is still not perfect and I find that if the policy is in any way lax smokers who do not conform to the rules tend to make up their own!

[SeagoingMom]

It's funny, just today DH and I were discussing cruises and we both agreed that Zuiderdam was the ugliest ship we had ever been on, although it was a close run contest with Norwegian Jewel. We had a good cruise on Zuiderdam, but the smoking policy makes Celebrity attractive to us, and we prefer the minimalistic decor of S class. If they just had a promenade deck they would be perfect!!

 

Sheila

 

Interesting! What made it "ugly" to you? I have not sailed on Norwegian. I'll go look at some ship pix.

 

Having just looked at pix of the Jewel, and I would agree with you, that it does not look attractive -- it looks like an explosion in the patterned carpet factory. Looking a pix of the Z-dam, I can see that she isn't so beautiful, either. Or maybe she's just not photogenic (like me!) I don't remember ever thinking she was ugly while on board. I do remember not thinking much of some of the artwork. But we loved our cruise, regardless.

 

Now I am wondering whether we thought Infinity was beautiful? I do remember liking the look of the Solarium...

[Mulege]

Carnval Corp. is dumbing down HAL like they have done to Carnival. Sad to take such a grand name and brand in cruising and ruin it. It's still a great cruise experience but not what it used to be.

[Cruising89143]

We cruised once on HAL and that was enough. It was the Oosterdam. The bed was the most comfortable that I have experienced on a ship. The balcony was nice but the stateroom which was a corner aft suite was just okay. X is much better in the suite department and Carnival Corp. has made those large aft corner balconies smaller.

 

The Oosterdam was cheap looking throughout the ship. Pinnacle Grill was disappointing and we tried it twice. MDR food quality was slightly better than RCI. Service not as good.

 

HAL is not for us.