First I would like to say my husband and I love to cruise. We've been on 8 other cruises. We've been on Carnival, Princess and RCCL. We tried HAL because it's one of the few that leaves from NY in the winter months. I'm sorry to say we should have stayed home! HAL was so bad all around that I wanted to be a stow away on another cruise ship in one of the ports!

EMBARKATION; This went smoothly after the cruise before came in late because of a storm. This was not HAL's fault. Once we started boarding it went quickly. When we had to do our safety drill that was the first encounter with VERY SARCASTIC crew members. Quite a few of them had given nasty answers to simple questions.

Activities; They had your usual pool games and I was told that were lucky because this ship had quite a few younger people to play these games! I'd say maybe 20% of the people were under 60 yrs. old. They had Bingo and really not much else. The shops were small, the casino was small, The pool area was also small. There was only 2 pools. SHORE EXCURSIONS; They had a selection of things to do but we found everything a little pricey. We just went our own way. Read more