Background- My husband and I are in our late 50's -early 60's, both professionals from South NJ. Most recently we have been on 8 Princess cruises. Since we have cruised with Princess the most and most recently, they will be my basis for comparison. Recently, we also traveled on 2 river cruises in Germany and France, which were a wonderful but very different cruise experience. Several years ago, we were on 3 Celebrity, 2 Royal Caribbean, 2 Renaissance and 1 Carnival. Of all these, our favorite was Renaissance- small size, no smoking and different itineraries. This was our first HAL cruise. We were aboard the March 19, 2008 sailing of the Noordam to the Eastern Caribbean.

Embarkation was delayed over 3 hours because the Noordam had hit bad weather returning to NYC. Of course, it was no one's fault that the pier situation was a mess with passengers disembarking and new passengers arriving. My husband dropped me off at Pier 92 and parked our car and found me with the "carry-on" and we made the trip to Pier 88! We had to walk four blocks in the rain, lugging our carry-on bags with way too much packed in them including several bottles of wine. Since we were just driving from our home in NJ, we brought our laptop too, so we really had a lot to carry. It wasn't the greatest way to start a vacation. Parking for the 10 day cruise was $180 and they did accept credit cards. We were given a $15 per person credit, I guess because many people missed lunch, which was a nice thing for HAL to do. I think we were finally on the ship around 4:30 PM. We had arrived at 12:30 PM. Another difference is the lifeboat drill on HAL. It is outside on a deck right below your assigned lifeboat. It was cold and rainy and took a long time while they called everyone's cabin number. On Princess it is a very serious matter also, but it is conducted inside in a comfortable theatre and there is no roll call.

Our Cabin was a VD category with a doublewide verandah. We were in cabin 4166. There were no lounge chairs there as expected and I asked our cabin steward if we could please have two loungers. He told us we would have to ask at the front desk, which I did. I got a call that afternoon telling me it was not possible to get the lounge chairs. The next day I saw a different person at the front desk and asked him for the lounge chairs but...this time I mentioned cruise critic. I said I had seen pictures on CC of this verandah with lounge chairs and was very disappointed! That afternoon the lounge chairs arrived. Cause and effect? I tend to think that "Cruise Critic" was the magic word. In my opinion our cabin did not have enough storage space and it was an awkward layout with doors blocking the bathroom. There were no drawers by the desk either to keep my make-up etc. Also, we could not use the refrigerator, as it was jammed with things to buy. This was another difference from Princess, which offers an empty refrigerator with a pitcher of cold water in it. I understand now that I should have asked our cabin steward to remove those refrigerator items and store them in my vanity chair but I did not know this at the time. Read more