We just completed our second HAL cruise, the southbound glacier explorer seven night cruise on the Statedam in Alaska.  We booked our cruise online via SmartCruiser.com.  This is our third cruise that we have booked through them and we have found them to be the lowest price around.  Agents have been very helpful and there have never been any problems with the cruise.  I recommend them.  This was our seventh cruise overall and second HAL cruise, having done a 12 day Mediterranean cruise in 2008 on the Zuiderdam.  We did three days pre cruise on our own.  Here is my review of the each individual part of the cruise, along with a review of the ports.

Pre Cruise land package:  We elected to book this on our own, even though it mirrored the HAL package.  I compared the two and HAL was about $1000 more.  About the only difference I saw was some of the luggage handling.  We flew direct into Anchorage and stayed at the Comfort Inn Ship Creek.  We called for the complimentary shuttle, and had to wait quite a while because they only have one and it kept getting filled up before they got to us.  This turned out to be the one and only problem we had the entire vacation.  We booked this hotel because it was next door to the train station, but it was also on the banks of Ship Creek, a local salmon fishing stream.  We walked the shore for a while and saw lots of fishermen fly-fishing.  The hotel is just below the main city area, and I grabbed the shuttle up the hill where he let me off at a nice microbrewery.  It was about 10 PM, but they were open and I got a great pizza and munched on it while walking back to the hotel.  It is clean, has a free breakfast, and competitively priced (expensive, like all hotels in Anchorage in the summer).

The next morning we walked next door, with our luggage, to the train station.  I had pre-purchased two tickets on the McKinley Explorer, the same train that HAL uses.  Everyone else on there had booked the land package through HAL, and all were on our cruise.  The car, one of two, was not even half full.  It was a wonderful ride up with a great tour guide who was a local high school teacher.  We saw bear and moose, got some great pictures, and had a nice lunch in the dinning car.  We arrived in Denali at the scheduled time. Read more