Spanieleyes

Update on our HAL transfer to Schipol Airport - horrendous!! Our flight was at 1pm and HAL booked us on the transfer which met INSIDE the ship at 9.15am so we asked to be swapped to the earliest transfer at 8am. Very disorganised assistance and unhelpful getting off ship and onto coach. Just about to get to airport when the driver announced that since January, buses now have to drop off at Arrivals and not Departures! We discovered that there are no Assistance in Arrivals and the only advice the airport staff gave my husband was to direct him to Departures. All the while he was running about trying to sort this out, we were stranded on the path (a fair walk from the terminal) with our luggage and no seats for our elderly parents to sit on. Fortunately the driver was a saviour and he manage to find an abandoned airport wheelchair for my 92 year old father in law. After about 20 minutes my husband found his way back through the thousands and thousands of poor people who had clearly been queuing for hours!! The driver then showed us where the lifts etc were so we could get to Departures, as Assistance wouldn’t come out to where we were dropped in Arrivals!! We will never beable to thank the driver enough for his help. My frustration at all of this was that I point blank asked the Guest Services lady if the HAL transfer drops passengers off at their correct Terminal Departures, (so we could access Assistance), and she looked me in the eye and said ‘yes madam all passengers are dropped off at the same place’. Had we known how poor HAL are at helping passengers with assistance, we would have booked a private transfer. But when we booked our trip, we stupidly believed HAL’s assurances that this was the best and safest way to travel with family who needed assistance. Lesson Learned!!

Has anyone had any experience of disembarking ship at Amsterdam and going to Schipol please, using special assistance? We had booked transfers with HAL and our arrival transfer to the ship was a horrid nightmare! We complained to Guest Services and they just seem to want to blame our TA, even though we have full paper records of all communications between our TA, ourselves and HAL. (Our TA has also spoken to HAL head office, whilst we are still on the cruise and they have apologised and accepted their error.) We now leave our ship on Sunday morning and they have given us 9.15am disembarking and our flight leaves at 1pm!! I have tried to find out where the coach will drop us as we need to find the airport Special Assistance kiosks, but all I can get from Guest Services is that we all get dropped in the same place and the rest is not their problem. Absolutely dreading it now. Thanks for any advice or information on here.