Warning, if you are one of the “IheartHAL” clan and constantly excusing any service issues to protect your diminishing loyalty benefits , please don't read on. You wont like it!
Like to share a recent experience on HAL Koningsdam. For balance we are in our early sixties, well travelled and cruised ( 30 plus sailings) but first time on HAL.
We wanted to visit South Pacific and unlike most ...
This 35 day Hawaii/French Polynesia cruise was our longest ever and our 19th cruise overall on many different lines (Carnival, Celebrity, Cunard, NCL, Princess and Royal Caribbean).
We flew from Ontario to San Diego 3 days before the cruise and stayed at the Old Town Inn which was a great location to tour the city. We walked to historic Old Town and took the trolly tour to all the popular ...
This was a fantastic 35 day cruise. Everything was not perfect but nothing in life ever is.
We flew into San Diego a day early and stayed at the Wyndham Bayside hotel that is right across the street from the pier.
The next morning we went right across the street to board the cruise. They were calling 4 and 5 star mariners first. Since we were 4 star we went right in. We had to wait ...
Boarded in Sydney and with the VeriFLY app in hand we were onboard in 15 minutes. Our suite was ready and we dropped off our carry on bags and headed to the Lido.
We had a signature suite which we received via an upgrade offer. We had booked a veranda cabin, and the upgrade offer to a suite was too good of a deal to pass up.
Overall we enjoyed the ship and the 25 day sailing. We had 2 very ...
The main focus of this trip was to visit relatives in New Zealand and Australia. After spending a month travelling around the 2 countries we decided to board the Noordam to sail back to Vancouver. We found the ship very clean and well maintained. The cabin was adequate with a great balcony. There was an issue with the air conditioning in our stateroom which took 3 days to fix but we were ...
We purchased a Neptune suite in the rear corner, so we had good all-round views and a large veranda. The only thing that was good about this expensive cruise were the workers on board. Very good people.
Cabin - Large but many issues listed below.
Food - Good at start but got worse over the trip. The specialty restaurants were much better than the public ones.
Entertainment - Similar all ...
We are in our early 70's and have wanted to go on around Australia sailing for some time. Due to Covid we had to push our sail date back a year to the Noordam from the Oosterdam. We have been sailing on mostly HAL and Princess since the mid 80's. Its been nearly 3 months since our cruise ended and I was hoping I would feel better about the experience vs. how I felt at the cruise end in mid ...
I am in the middle of a 67 day HAL cruise from the states all around Australia. This is a bucket list cruise, until HAL put holes in my bucket. No on-board passengers while sailing from the states were allowed to book any excursions in future ports of AU until we reached Sydney. Meanwhile close to 1500 passengers boarding in Sydney had been booking excursions from home, resulting in all good ...
1. Itinerary kept being changed before and during the voyage mainly due to islands with Covid-related issues such as lack of tourist infrastructure for two years. During the cruise, stormy weather also affected some scheduled ports, especially tendering operations. We were about 1,700 passengers, mostly from the US but a large group from Canada and a few from other countries. Due to the length ...
We choose this cruise for a few reasons. 1) we had always wanted to go to this area of the world 2) we love the "at sea" days as much as port days and 3) there were at sea days between every country visited, so on the off chance that someone would have gotten Covid, we would only have missed at most 1 country. As it was, we traveled with another couple,1 person got Covid, and missed 1 country. ...