I was on the Maasdam Cruise that departed on Nov. 30, 2006. The boarding was delayed by about 2 hours due to the norovirus concerns. This is fine but there was no procedure for insuring that people were treated on a first come first served basis it was more like a mob scene and there was no one or not even a sign advising what the problem was.
Although I had requested assistance in boarding my wife with a wheel chair (which we brought with us) we were left on our own until we got to the gangplank. The disembarkation was even worse, they told us by letter to go to the Rembrandt theater and some one would be there to assist us in getting off the ship. When our number and color was called there was no one there to assist us and the elevators were a big mess. The first elevator we got on had a mechanical problem and would not go to deck three, it would go to deck four and then start up again. We finally got off on deck five and after 5 plus minutes we were finally able to get the wheel chair on a different elevator that got us to deck three. We got off the elevator and proceeded to the gangplank and thank goodness some of the crew members assisted me in getting the wheel chair off the ship. This whole procedure needs lots of work, what surprised me is that I took this cruise about two or three years ago and had the same problem boarding and disembarking with our wheel chair. I must say that my experience with Princess and Carnival Cruise lines have been much superior in assisting people with wheel chairs.
Another problem that we had was at Half Moon Cay, my wife chose not to leave the ship so this was not a wheel chair problem. It seems that not enough tenders were in use, our number was called and we proceeded to deck three and stood in the hallway for 40+ minutes waiting to board a tender, then when we got on board we waited another 15+ minutes for the tender to be fully loaded. We finally got to the Island at about 1:25pm, at 2pm they started shutting down the BBQ, so we had to rush from the beach in order to get a sandwich. Then at 3:25pm we got in line to get a tender back to the ship and stood in line for 30+ minutes, I think we got back to the ship about 4:20pm. This was a very bad experience and again it has not improved since my previous trip, the last time we got to spend about two hours at Half Moon Cay and no meal was served because we arrived late.