love2learn

Thanks for this review, we were on the same cruise and for the most part really enjoyed it. It was our first time on HAL and we were a bit nervous hearing many complaints here on CC but it was the itinerary we wanted and the price seemed good. I thought the food was mostly good, I think the Lido needs a better late night selection... but the food there was really quite good.

Our biggest complaint about this cruise, and I am curious to know if this is typical of HAL, is the port talks were so empty. We cruised to Alaska once before on Princess and we had Michael Modzelewski for our Alaskan export. His presentations were so incredible. We did the Tracey Arm fjord and he narrated the entire time telling us what to watch for and where to look. I was anticipating something like that at Glacier Bay, and though the Glaciers were beautiful the very slight narration was a lady reading a script written for 4th graders. We went to a couple of "port talks" with Kimberly, but they were just basically telling what kind of shore excursions were available, Very disappointing. The captain did a talk one afternoon that was interesting, we enjoyed that. WE did another cruise with princess and our port specialist was John Lawrence. Again, he was so interesting to listen to and made the Baltic fascinating for us. I'm just wondering if Hal ever has interesting port experts, or if that just isn't their specialty. We did do a cruise with Princess from New Zealand to Australia and the port expert was really disappointing after the others we had experienced, so I'm just wondering for future planning.

There were 15 of us in our group and we did have a great time.

Thanks so much for taking to provide these.