My wife and I just completed a 14 day cruise from Auckland to Sydney on the Statendam. Here are our observations. (Note - two years ago we did a South America cruise with Celebrity, so I am using that as a comparison point.)

DINING: HAL has an open dining feature on this boat. We liked this feature, it gave us a lot more flexibility. For us the food was over spicy, over salty, and pretentious. After about a week we found that we preferred to eat in the upstairs buffet (the LIDO deck) -- for us the food actually tasted better there than in the main dining room! Note -- we really DID LIKE the fact that they had no-sugar ice cream.

ENTERTAINMENT: We were very pleased with the outside entertainers they brought onto the ship; they were all of high quality. We were less impressed by the ship's singers -- they were only OK in our opinion. Read more