My wife and I just returned from a two-week, back-to-back western and eastern Caribbean cruise on Holland America’s Nieuw Amsterdam. For the record, this was our 37th cruise over the past 20 years and our second on HAL, having sailed on Eurodam for a New Year’s cruise at the end of 2010. We traveled with one other couple. With regret, this may be our final cruise on HAL; to find out why, please read on.
Let me say at the outset that of the many reviews that I’ve written on this website, this will be the first that is not highly positive with respect to the overall cruise experience. I mention this because we truly love cruising – pretty much all varieties, including river cruising. Although we have cruised mostly in the Caribbean, Europe, and North America, we have sampled most of the U.S. mainstream cruise lines and others, and we have almost always come away thrilled with each cruise experience. Over the years, as our sailing interests have evolved and we have become more selective, our love of cruising has remained steadfast. So we truly are not that hard to please.
To be sure, there were several outstanding aspects to this cruise. We selected it largely because our previous experience on HAL was wonderful. Because Nieuw Amsterdam is virtually identical to Eurodam, our expectations were high. The itinerary included several of our favorite stops (Key West; Grand Cayman; Cozumel; St. Thomas) as well as two new locations for us (Grand Turk – one of the few islands we’ve not visited in the past – and Half Moon Cay, HAL’s private island in the Bahamas). In short, the two-week back-to-back itinerary promised just what we hoped for: a respite from winter weather where we could just relax in the sun and not do much sightseeing and running around the ports.