Let me first say that our cruise on the Nieuw Amsterdam is my 8th cruise and my 1st with Holland America. I have only sailed with Royal Caribbean and have been on everything from their biggest and newest to oldest and smallest ship, but my husband and I have found that we prefer the smaller, quieter, more intimate Vision-Class ships in the RCI fleet so we thought we would give HAL a try since that is what they specialize in. This is a rather detailed review that compares RCI to our experience on HAL simply because we had no idea what to expect. In short, we had a fabulous trip and I wanted to share in case you were curious about HAL.

Check-In

We were worried about check-in because our express documents that we filled out online weren't available to print the day before our cruise due to a complete website overhaul. We always wait to print cruise docs just in case we have to change any info at the last minute. We called HAL who just told us to arrive early at the pier so we loaded up and drove overnight (from NC) and arrived at Port Everglades in Ft. Lauderdale at 10:15 AM. The porters put tags on our bags and filled them out since we couldn't print ours and we walked into check-in at around 10:45 AM. The agent made a joke and told us we couldn't board since we didn't print our express docs then told us that it was fine since he could see what we had filled out online and then further joked that half of their clients never got "on the line" to fill out their documents in the first place. After getting our cards we were given a number for boarding and we boarded at 11:20 AM. We found the whole process at the pier to be completely painless, which is not always the case. Read more