OlsSalt

Building larger ships and adding more onboard frou frou was a strategic error for the cruise industry. Get back to basics - sea travel. Room and board, while getting there and back. No jet lag, pack and unpack once. Salt air. A traveling house party with amiable guests, who understand they need to be self-contained, well-mannered, and share the space with fellow equally minded travelers.

I am reminded of my first long cruise in the 1970's - the low cost, round the world Italian ship - the Galileo - Lloyd-Triestino. We were handed a huge menu on day one from which to make choices. Only to learn each day's menu just changed the names of the items offered, but did not fundamentally change the actual item. How many ways can you say cream of chicken soup in various modern European languages? I learned quiickly, as many ways as their are days in the week. Then we also learned if we ordered anything other than what the "chef was recommending" that day, we would be served last while everyone else was finishing the "chefs recommendations" which had already been prepared. We again quickly learned to take what was put in front of us. But since this was an Italian ship in its bones, the chef did the right thing and we ate well. Once we learned to not fight their well-honed system.

FYI: We thought in our 60's we were vastly different from "old people" too. But in fact we weren't. We found we loved the quiet pace, the price and the itineraries HAL offered. We thank our lucky stars we fell into the HAL "old people" ambiance, when we did not know one cruise line from the next. On board entertainment never once played a role in out own decisions about HAL. Unless the huge positive of quiet dedicated library space can be called our preferred form of on-board entertainment. ] Onboard enrichment was a surprising bonus back in our early HAL days. We had no idea to expect this on these larger ship brands. Subsequently our favorite longer cruises on HAL excelled when onboard enrichment was a standard park of the HAL package. Losing dedicated on board enrichment and the ship libraries, perhaps now put more demands on generic evening entertainment? Evenings were spent with new and serendipitous onboard library discoveries. I was happy. And HAL became our cruise line of choice..when we were in our 60's.

Deja vu on the Queen Mary - the forward deck spooky "quarantine" bunks - true isolation chambers for the various pandemics of the day at that time. Maintaining the Queen Mary, let alone refurbishing her, has become overly burdensome for Long Beach. Not sure what her current fate now is. Certainly removing her First Class bar lounge to a more permanent land location, would be one way to save her former Art Deco grandeur.

Here is one clue about what to expect when asking for "gradueur" when choosing similar long itineraries in South America: price HAL ships Zaandam-Zuidedam: $9,000 to $15,000 "Grand Luxury Lines - Silversea-Regent: $42,000 - $199.000 Caveat Emptor when picking future "grand" cruises. Fort Lauderdale, FL Fort Lauderdale, FL Silversea / Silver Nova 6 $199,600 $52,000 74% Suite! #22433

The itinerary was grand. Sorry you did not enjoy it. This is one of our own very favorite cruises. Hard to know up front what some marketing words mean to everyone.

We had two different veranda cabins on the sister ship Konigsdam. What we noticed is the Deck 4 cabin had very short storage drawers by the closets, compared to our cabin on Deck 8. However, we were packed for 19 days and it still all fit in the Deck 4 cabin. I don't know if the short drawers - about half the depth of the other deck drawers - were a quirk just for Deck 4 or not. The bonus on Deck 4 was a very expanded balcony, so it was a nice tradeoff. Hope your Deck 5 cabin does not have this same feature. We assumed it was caused by some internal obstructions on Deck 4, in that location.

We did an overnight stay once on the Queen Mary, docked in the Long Beach Harbor as a hotel now. They learned after the fact there was inadequate sound proofing between ship's cabins, since the sound and vibrations of the ship during travel were sufficient to muffle adjoining noise, now missing when it became a fixed floating hotel. A curious feature in the Queen Mary's also very roomy cabins was the tub had separate faucets for plain water, or for sea water baths. Plus a call light for when you wanted to appropriate cabin steward to come towel you off after your bath - one light for men and one for women.

You actually did get what you paid for ......if you read the fine print about itinerary changes. HAL did not do this on whim and caprice. Many of us have had mid-cruise port changes - it comes with the realities of sea travel and most often variable weather conditions. Plus now including local opposition to cruise ships that happen, after intermarries were first published.

What if HAL continues concentrates on the large Boomer demographics which are turning 60-70 every single day? A sizable replacement cohort already exists for us Golden Oldies, who also started cruising HAL in our 60's but realistically will be soon gone. Sooner rather than later, if HAL destroy the mature ambiance and satisfaction that has long been the strength of the HAL appeal these past 30 years or so years. HAL never had to reach down into the 30-40' set to develop its future loyal client base, just so they will be still around when they are in their 70-80's. That needs corroboration. The 30-40 set will probably be done with "active" cruising before they are 60 if they start that early - after they have seen and done it all for 20 or so years. Far more predictable they will also be seeking out the quieter pleasures of slow, lazy travel; not onboard frenetics. Stick with appealing to the 60-70 crowd of every successive generation - they do continue to come down the pike. Relentlessly, with every turn of the calendar page. HAL will do just fine if they refuse to stray from their long-standing strengths - a cruise line for "old people".

Tipping room service is not necessary, only a personal preference - it is an included dining option, just like not tipping every meal in the MDR. Your call.

Isn't that the whole point about teaching good table manners -- guiding children into new learning, rather than letting them arbitrarily set the standards. (Old school, I know.)

Never forget our first HAL cruise that came into Rotterdam, before the recent port terminal expansion We could still directly view the old godowns dockside, with those wonderful sounding names: Sumatra, Celebes, Java ....... Over time HAL look us to nearly all of them. Thank you HAL. To be on the Rotterdam ship in Fort Rotterdam, Indonesia was truly coming full circle in celebration of Holland's East Indies heritage.

Something disturbing about making even very young kids brain dead with electronics, and calling it good behavior. But I am old school, and the one who still thinks it is a good idea to offer a Formal Dining Etiquette workshop as an onboard youth activity choice. Formal dining events still do take place, and remain one of the more subtle parts of career advancement evaluations. For a fun look at this probably vintage concept of teaching manners to modern youth, see if you can find a small documentary called "Bogalusa Charm School".

Music to my ears that CLL will be forced drop building bigger ships. Talk about a failed business plan for the cruise industry -generic bus trips, generic bus routes and fewer ports who even want these behemoths. As much fun as wearing Zuckerbergs Meta-Universe glasses. Sea travel was first for sheer transportation and commerce, then travel with more onboard creature comforts, then on to some crazed idea that bigger, better, more novel and almost totally removed from actually being at sea itself was the state of "sea travel". Bah! Shades of the over-built PanAm fall from airline industry dominance, all playing out again.

Oceania would always send out loss-leader pricing, only to learn upon calling that they had already been sold out. But perhaps you would be interested in these cabins ..............at much higher prices.

Point is, many of us would still cruise even if it was like the no frills, more regimented "bad old days". That is the market to capture for at least one cruise line to prosper. Some of us still cruise to travel. That remains a viable market. And people will continue to age in to it. No one ever said it needed to be the entire market. But is is a viable market. No reason for this not to be HAL's niche. And everyone else can go to the other cruise lines who offer more than just "travel" with a comfortable bed and decent food and formality.

Somebody has to pay off the loans caused by the CDC instant shut down of the entire cruise industry, As foreign flagged vessels, Uncle Sam was able to turn his back on these CDC fallouts. It was a very odd time for the global cruise industry. The amount of money to keep them afloat for two years, with no paying customers was certainly a crummy business plan. Of course we will need to pay more to get less, unless someone else can explain the economics to me better.

How is it that young people also do not get older every day? Tastes change, even if you have promised yourself YOU will never get old and be like THEM.

This is how I remember our first Christmas cruise on the Oosterdam, when one knows up front and expects lots of kids on board. The moms got the job of constantly running the kids in and out of the main dining room, simply because the longer onboard dining times were just too much for the younger kids to handle. However, I also thought HAL was missing a bet not teaching table etiquette courses to young people in this more formal dining setting, as one of their onboard youth activity programs.

Making the promised, quiet, serene adults-only Retreat Cabanas "family friendly" on our last Konigsdasm cruise was a total fail. Except for the family with the six kids running amok - they got a good deal.

Maybe too many new cruisers who don't fully understand there are unwritten "cruise manners"? Because they are unwritten, how could they. Or come from cultures that do not understand queuing up. Creating two opposing lines at the Lido -when did that ever start spontaneously by passengers? Might be a new reality cruise lines need to face rather than assuming passengers on their own will be "orderly" when it comes to lining up, which in the past HAL passengers were almost uniformly so. Even when port officials pulled last minute switches, like requiring a face to face meeting when leaving a port - surprise to all of us returning after a day in port. Apparently the shore authorities were running a shake-down operation to avoid this and our noble captain said no, so they forced this last minute "procedures" on us. Worst off-boarding experiences we ever had were in India several years ago - where every port had new regulations and gauntlets we had to run. Total nightmare, and the onboard staff worked hard late into the night to meet the ever changing shores-side regulations, which were entirely India's fault. So this could be one-off, or not. But does not bode well for the future of onboard life on cruise ships.

Seeing how selling their wonderful older, smaller ships gave new life to other cruise lines, good to hear they are holding on to the very few they now have left. They are still very valued ships to have kept in the HAL inventory. That might have been a strategic error on HAL's part "early-covid".

The Groote Beer did become a HAL ship after her WWII service. DH made his first trip to Europe in the 1950's on a similar WWII troop ship The Waterman. Both featured in in the following article: https://www.shippingtandy.com/features/groote-beer-waterman-and-zuiderkruis/

My grandparents also loved traveling on freighters. When we saw them off in San Francisco, I remember how large their en suite cabins were. What a surprise when I got on my own first cruise ship - the Chandris Fantasia, and the cabin was the size of a large closet.