Overall, HAL has gotten fat and lazy, just like most of its clientele. It doesn't make any effort to assure that the information they provide about ports is comprehensive or current. The furniture in the rooms is stained, dirty, badly beaten down and some of it is broken. The carpeting in the main entertainment center has shredded and ripped areas, which pose an actual tripping hazard. It makes no effort from start to finish on a cruise to vary the menu at the Pool Grill, Pool buffet, Main Dining room and Specialty restaurants. Food is heavily salted, fatty, starchy, and prepared in some of the greasiest ways possible. Even the salad bar lacks healthy choices as they load it with starchy choices along with numerous salads made with mayonnaise. HAL policies and practices are too rigid, but they manage to put the company's wellbeing ahead of the customer, at all times.

The embarkation process at Sydney was a complete third world experience. Computers shut down and needed re-booting but no one knew that for about an hour. Then 1800 people had to be processed through a temporary "tent" facility and put into large groups to wait to be called. When a group was called, people rushed up without regard for the group number they were in and the crew could not check because there was no card given that said what group number you were in. Check in took in excess of 90 minutes, regardless of when a person arrived. Pure chaos.

The cruise wasted two days (of the published itinerary) at sea doing nothing but circles and floating. This was an affront to us. It is misrepresentation when HAL used a sea day to go from one port to another when the actual travel time on the ship at 15 knots would be less than 12 hours. This results in false figures when making comparisons between competitors' cruises. Adding unnecessary days to the schedule, just to inflate the cruise duration is a misleading and crass practice. HAL knowingly went to a city (Noumea) that is completely shut down on Sunday. McDonald's was the only business open in a town of 100,000 people. All shops were closed, all museums were closed. Waste of time. The captain had the opportunity to rectify this problem when a storm caused him to re-plan 8 days of the cruise's port schedule once we were underway. He chose to skip a port, just to keep the scheduled arrival at Noumea on the day it was completely closed. Read more