Real NHDOC

Usually there are two sea days on a 7 day itinerary and the cake event is on the second sea day.

Sounds like all things HAL, inconsistency is the only thing that can be counted upon. We have not been on either of those two ships since Covid. Hopefully the lunch will be restored fleet-wide. We have noticed also on some ships, like the Nieuw Statendam, every sea day the MDR is open for lunch there is always an additional “daily special” small and large plate option. For those who complain that the static menu gets too boring there are some options. Also we have been pleasantly surprised by having a special Caribbean brunch on one of the sea days on each cruise this season with a completely different menu from the normal lunch.

Good to hear, however we were on Zaandam in December, Eurodam in January and February and now Nieuw Statendam and despite being invited to every Mariner award ceremony there hasn’t been a single special Mariner’s lunch offered. I will ask our hotel manager at our next reception and see what he says.

There hasn’t been a Mariner’s lunch since Covid. I have been on at least a dozen cruises on HAL since then and none have been offered. I don’t think they will bring it back either. Maybe the crew on K-dam didn’t get that memo when they held one in December. Heads will probably roll if someone at the home office finds out, LOL.

If the OP’s friend is in a Neptune suite they will receive free laundry and priority boarding and tendering anyway so the 4* benefit would not be that much different from the 3* level with the exception of the higher discount in the specialty restaurants and wine packages.

We actually landed up at NY deli for lunch on embarkation day just after it opened at noon. Mine was one of the first orders in and it took about 30 minutes to get our pizza. By the time I went to pick it up they were telling people it would be over an hour so they should consider going downstairs to the lido instead. So that isn’t an attractive option any more!

I forgot to mention how on this, our first cruise to begin without lunch in the MDR that the lido didn’t open for lunch until noon. So there was quite a backlog of newly embarked passengers waiting to eat by the time it did open since boarding began at 11. It wasn’t a pleasant place to be. I have also noticed on this ship that the hours of the venues like the exploration cafe and NY deli start later than they used to. We got spoiled on Eurodam when we could get the “good” coffee in the crows nest at 6am. On this ship it is 7am. The dutch cafe opens at 6:30 but being the only venue it gets crowded, especially on early port days. We no longer buy coffee in the morning but rather just drink the free stuff on the lido deck so HAL has lost at least one customer for the specialty coffee. It will save us around $100 that we would have otherwise spent. NY deli doesn’t open for breakfast until 7:30 even though the lido opens at 6:30-7:00am.

It seems that staggered check in times have also recently been eliminated as everyone for our Sunday cruise had the same assigned boarding (not check in) time of 12:00. Boarding began at 11:00am, as usual. In fact, if you follow the new requirements everyone had to be checked in by 1pm. So everyone could easily have made it to the MDR by 1pm if they wanted to (if it was open).

When we were on Eurodam just last month we had over 500 B2B guests on one turnover day and the dining room was pretty busy for both breakfast and lunch. As others have stated the main reason more people didn’t take advantage of the lunch in the MDR is it was a “well kept secret”. For whatever reason HAL never wanted people to know it was available. I always assumed they did this intentionally to keep the burden on the dining room staff low but to say now that they’re discontinuing it because it wasn’t well attended seems to be disingenuous. Had they actually invited embarking guests to it I suspect it would have been very well attended.

Please post any response you receive. I also plan to express my disappointment when the cruise ends and we receive the survey looking for comments on how they could make the experience better.

My sentiments exactly!

I asked the hotel manager aboard Nieuw Statendam why there was no lunch in the dining room on embarkation day Sunday and was told that HAL has discontinued the embarkation day lunch service fleetwide as of two weeks ago because they felt it wasn’t well attended enough to justify the effort. Very disappointing. I hope the beancounters reconsider this shortsighted decision.

The main problem is the crew really doesn’t like to be the bad guy and enforce any rules. During Covid when masks were mandatory and guests weren’t complying the staff said nothing and wouldn’t. They rarely enforce the rules against children in the hot tub or fitness center. They are trained to be nice and not say no to guests so it’s against their nature to police the guests. But we all know that rules that aren’t enforced are meaningless. That’s what the chair hogs (and breakers of other rules) rely on.

I am on the same ship. By just after 6am an entire row of lounge chairs at the end of the lido pool was “reserved” with a combination of flip-flops, books and personal belongings that nobody occupied during the time I spent having coffee. They should have sent that notice out last night because by 8am when it went out there were literally dozens of loungers being held.

There are still plenty of drinks that can be had for $11 or less and the recent price increase was pretty modest compared to what we just experienced on Celebrity. Their limit is $10 and there’s basically nothing that can be had for that so their basic drink package is just “$10 off any drink”. Their “elegance” wines that used to be $10 a glass as recently as January are now $17. So unless you have their premium drink package you pay $8.40 per glass for wine that used to be included in the package. Many wines were over $20 a glass as were many premium cocktails. It’s inflated way beyond inflation rates and by comparison HAL is a bargain.

Pleased to report the navigator app now shows the 50% off H H at 4pm aboard Nieuw Statendam! Great deal at the perfect time of day.

Some days it says 25% off second drink and some just say the generic “join us for…”. On my Navigator it says the 25% off on the first sea day but on the subsequent days it just has the generic statement. But nowhere does it say 50% off like it says in the daily.

I don’t think the H H is different on sea days. I think the navigator app is wrong but I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens next week. Every other HAL ship we have been on in the past year or so has been having 50% off drinks as their happy hour on every day but the first day (traditionally there is no H H on the embarkation day). H H is typically from 4-5pm. Some ships have it in two bars and some ships also have a later H H in the ocean bar (9 or 10pm) in addition to 4-5pm but they always have it in the Billboard bar if there’s only one bar offering it.

My navigator shows this for the first sea day I stand by my prior comments about HALs ability to fix their IT system problems.

Great news! Looking forward to coming aboard. Thanks for the response. I just wish someone at HAL knew how to update the Navigator app since apparently it still reflects the H H from over a year ago.

I am the OP of this thread and am getting ready to board N-S on Sunday. According to the app, the H H is only 25% off the second drink (again like it was last year). If that is the case I will lobby the beverage manager again to get it changed. If we’re lucky the app is in error but if not it might take some arm twisting again to get it changed. We have already sailed on Zaandam and Eurodam this winter and on both the happy hour was the standard 50% off. It seems like N-S always “sails to its own winds”. The H H special only got changed last year after the beverage manager got changed to one I know to be reasonable (Csaba). Once he verified that N-S was the only ship in the fleet not giving 50% off at the pre- dinner hour (4-5pm) he changed it. Fingers crossed that he’s coming back onboard this year!

People seem to be under the mistaken impression that “the casino” is a completely separate entity from the cruise line when, in fact, both are owned by Carnival corporation. Ocean Players Club and HAL are the two subsidiaries of the same company so thinking that HAL doesn’t care if a gambler doesn’t show up after being offered a discounted cabin just isn’t true. While the bookkeeping may show OPC “paying for the cabin” if they don’t see revenue being generated in the casino then it will certainly be noted. Whether they impose any penalty on the guest who shows up or not probably isn’t something anyone here can conclusively determine because like everything HAL does it can impose a penalty one day and not the next. So go at your own risk - good luck!

We recently were able to stream YouTube videos on premium service on Eurodam. This was a couple of weeks ago and might have changed since then but it was after HAL announced the streaming service level.

My point was that this was just another example of how Celebrity’s service is lacking. I find the best way to communicate with the cabin stewards is to leave a note in the cabin. We were surprised that there wasn’t any paper or pen in the room, or even readily available after asking for one. I don’t travel with a pen, no. And I don’t take them with me at the end of the cruise but do like to have one available. I never said I wouldn’t choose Celebrity because there wasn’t a pen in the cabin. I just thought others would find it funny that only if you pay for a suite are you deemed worthy of a note pad and even then, you don’t get a pen to write on it.

Imagine what would happen if HAL started charging for the food at the Dutch Cafe? Mutiny! Anyway our sentence aboard Apex ends on Saturday and we will join the Nieuw Statendam on Sunday for four weeks. Looking forward to being back on HAL. While HAL certainly has areas they can improve upon, our stay on Apex has made us appreciate HAL more than ever.