POA1's Cruise Shopping Helper - Consolidated Deck Plans

[POA1]

We were trying to choose some sailings and staterooms and I started to get a little tired of opening up each ship's deck plan and trying to find a good cabin location, public areas and other amenities.  So, I said to myself, "Self you have the skills needed to solve the problem of constantly re-downloading deck plans.  You should do that." And here we are: The May 2023 Holland America Line Consolidated Deck Plans.

 

The link takes you to Evernote and you can download the file from there.  At the bottom of this post is a little diagram that shows you how the file "works."  I took all the deck plan pages from the 11 ships in the fleet and put them into a single PDF file. I then provided an index and bookmarks to each of the 120 decks. You may or may not find this to be helpful, but I figured I'd throw it out there for you, my HAL Boards Pals.

 

Important: You do not need to have Evernote installed to use this file. Just open the link in your browser and download the PDF.

 

Here's a tiny "explainer" to show you how to find things.

 

 

 

In case you missed the link, here it is again:

The May 2023 Holland America Line Consolidated Deck Plans.

Edited May 21, 2023 by POA1

[Cruise Suzy]

Sure cleans up my "Recent Files" list in Acrobat Reader!

[Mary229]

You are so clever.  Thank you.  Now in your spare time could you create a cruise atlas?😉

Edited May 21, 2023 by Mary229

[oaktreerb]

7 minutes ago, Mary229 said:

You are so clever.  Thank you.  Now in your spare time could your create a cruise atlas?😉

Fortunately I still have my 3/2020 to 3/2021 Cruise Atlas which is handy for deck plans.  Somewhat outdated but handy for stateroom selection.  If HAL ever produces a new Cruise Atlas I hope they will print it out for us so we can pick it up onboard.  

[kazu]

Thank you @POA1.  🙂 

[POA1]

You are all very welcome. I got tired of pulling down the deck plans every time we wanted to look at a sailing. I know that HAL has that really wide PDF with all the decks on it, but I like the one deck per page version better. And, this means that I only need one file. I'll have to update it when there is a major change, but that's pretty rare.

[VMax1700]

Thanks, that is very usefull. 

Should be made a sticky!

Now, how about sorting out the HAL website for us????? 🤣🤣

[wdw1972]

Thank you - I like it!

 

Sue/WDW1972

[whogo]

Great work, POA1, thank you.

 

I opened the PDF file in Apple's Preview app instead of my browser and used Preview's search function to find my desired ship. 

[POA1]

32 minutes ago, whogo said:

Great work, POA1, thank you.

 

I opened the PDF file in Apple's Preview app instead of my browser and used Preview's search function to find my desired ship. 

I know that the table of contents / bookmarks can be found on a phone, but the little side bar only shows up on a bigger screen. I made sure that full text indexing was left intact. That means you should be able to search on any text in the file, including cabin numbers.

 

Acrobat files have a lot of extraneous, invisible text in them, so you may get more in the way of search results than you'd expect. I searched for 7045 and found the starboard PS on the Vista class, but also a bunch of seemingly blank areas.

 

My eyes are not quite good enough for the phone version.

 

 

Edited May 21, 2023 by POA1

[oakridger]

Excellent tool @POA1!!  It is now pinned in my Favorites Bar right next to the HAL website.  I guess we'll keep you around on CC for a while longer!!

😁

~Nancy

[rafinmd]

4 hours ago, kazu said:

Thank you @POA1.  🙂 

Is this a candidate to be added to halfacts?

 

Roy

[Radbooks]

Thank you!

[POA1]

53 minutes ago, rafinmd said:

Is this a candidate to be added to halfacts?

 

Roy

Sure, if you would like to, be my guest. No attribution needed.

 

The only concern might be the bandwidth. I optimized the file, but it's still 15 MB. That's why I stuck it in Evernote and not on one of my servers.

[kazu]

1 hour ago, rafinmd said:

Is this a candidate to be added to halfacts?

 

Roy

 

We can’t take anything of a HAL Site.  It needs to be submitted to pictures@halfacts.com

As @POA1 said not sure if it will work on word press.  But I’ll leave that to our tech genius and won’t even attempt it 😉 

[2LoveBikes]

Very creative and useful!  Thank you.

[aliaschief]

@POA1Thank you sir!

[Haljo1935]

Thanks for doing this. I do keep every HAL deck plan on my phone and find myself referencing on every cruise, so this will be a nice replacement. 

[MAVIP]

Thank you very very much!  Just one question: what can be the reason that I donot see the bookmarks and index?  (On my PC).

Edited May 23, 2023 by MAVIP
PC

[ski ww]

Thanks for posting this.

[puppycanducruise]

Thank you!

[POA1]

2 hours ago, MAVIP said:

Thank you very very much!  Just one question: what can be the reason that I donot see the bookmarks and index?  (On my PC).

In Acrobat Reader, there's a chance thar the menu bar (File, Edit, View, etc.) was toggled off. I'm pretty sure F9 brings it back. Under the View menu, I believe you can click on the menu choice to show the Bookmarks bar.

 

I'm on my phone at the moment, so those instructions are from memory. If that doesn't solve the issue, let me know and all check later from full size computing machinery.

[MAVIP]

51 minutes ago, POA1 said:

In Acrobat Reader, there's a chance thar the menu bar (File, Edit, View, etc.) was toggled off. I'm pretty sure F9 brings it back. Under the View menu, I believe you can click on the menu choice to show the Bookmarks bar.

 

I'm on my phone at the moment, so those instructions are from memory. If that doesn't solve the issue, let me know and all check later from full size computing machinery.

Thanks, I found the Bookmarks and it works perfect! 

[POA1]

37 minutes ago, MAVIP said:

Thanks, I found the Bookmarks and it works perfect! 

Glad that worked. Oddly, the phone version of Acrobat on Android uses the term Table of Contents, although the desktop version calls it the Bookmarks Bar. Either way, I'm happy to help and really glad to hear that I wasn't the only person who hated opening up a single ship deck plan over and over.

[DCThunder]

Isn't this the same thing as Cruise Deck Plan Database and Pictures (cruisedeckplans.com) where you can get deck plans for all ships on all cruise lines.  I realize there's a fee to use anything more than the basic public portion of that website, but that resource is out there too.

 

Nevertheless, nice achievement by the OP.