This review will cover our trip from August 31 to Sept 6 on the Amsterdam to Alaska. We visited friends before the cruise and drove right to the terminal and found very good parking right across the street from the check in. I am going to write this review from the perspective of a handicapped person who became very ill just before the cruise and in truth did not have the best time in the world. We have cruised over 20 times before so we knew what to expect. Embarkation was a breeze except for a rather long wait for a wheel chair. I looked at that long ramp going up to the ship and knew I'd never make it on my own. I am on Oxygen 24/7 but at sea level I'm able to discard it during the day and only use it at night but I still have difficulty walking due to arthritic knees and ankles. HAL was very accommodating and managed to get one of their wheel chairs and an attendant who took me directly to my cabin which was wonderful. We had booked the cruise through a travel agency that specializes in providing for people with chronic lung disease and they did a marvelous job of seeing that HAL provided for our needs and HAL certainly did that.
CABIN: was fine except my wife also does nightly peritoneal dialysis in addition to my oxygen needs. So the cabin had her dialysis machine, 7 boxes of dialysis solution, my liquid oxygen tank and an small oxygen concentrator for night use. It was crowded to say the least and in hindsight I will get a bigger cabin next time. However we did find that putting the beds on either side, rather than combined as a king was much better for our needs and gave us much more room. We had a wonderful room steward and he kept the room in wonderful shape
Unfortunately I was feeling very poorly, so not only did I cancel all my shore excursions which I had booked online (HAL was superb in refunding my money when they saw my condition) I never went outside on deck. I pretty much stayed in my cabin, read, rested, got my e-mail in the library and went to meals.