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veendam


world~citizen
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Wasn't crazy about the red dining room decor and carpeting, but that was about it.

 

The rest was classic "R" class small ship - with the addition of aft cabins, lanai cabins and large hot tubs that replaced the aft deck pool on the Lido deck.

 

Those have been "problems" in the past including the loss of most open-use promenade deck chairs. But there were few at sea days on this cruise so this loss was not as much of a problem at it might be when there is more competition for the few remaining open-use promenade deck chairs.

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DW and I sailed the Veendam last year for the entire 35 day Voyage of the Vikings. Save an incredible price/itinerary, I'll not sail an "S" class again. First, there are only two elevator bays, fore, and aft, none midship. During our cruise, one of the aft bay, (port, aft), never did operate, and of the forward bay, who knew on any given day. This created crowding at popular times.

We've sailed the Volendam a number of times, and an equal veranda cabin on the Veendam is noticeably smaller. An issue on a cruise of any length.

The Showroom At Sea, IMO is intolerable as a theater, showroom. The balcony seats are uninhabitable. Apparently others thought the same, since a large number of open seats in the balcony could be seen from the already overcrowded main floor below, whose seats were none too comfortable as well. In order to get a nice seat at nearly any event, attendence an hour early was necessary. On our cruise, events were scheduled, back to back to back. More than once we spent four consecutive hours in the Showroom, i.e., securing a seat, lecture, port talk, lecture.

While the HAL staff provided their usual excellent service, certain other operational decisions on this cruise were, in my opinion, poor, and hopefully won't translate to further cruises.

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Spent 2 separate weeks on her in the past 14 months. And 20 prior to that. Love that "little" lady. Lots of nice spaces outdoors to enjoy. Different strokes for different folks....

 

There were big issues in the summer of 2012 and a very bad CDC inspection. Things got turned around by our January 2013 cruise.

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DW and I sailed the Veendam last year for the entire 35 day Voyage of the Vikings. Save an incredible price/itinerary, I'll not sail an "S" class again. First, there are only two elevator bays, fore, and aft, none midship. During our cruise, one of the aft bay, (port, aft), never did operate, and of the forward bay, who knew on any given day. This created crowding at popular times.

We've sailed the Volendam a number of times, and an equal veranda cabin on the Veendam is noticeably smaller. An issue on a cruise of any length.

The Showroom At Sea, IMO is intolerable as a theater, showroom. The balcony seats are uninhabitable. Apparently others thought the same, since a large number of open seats in the balcony could be seen from the already overcrowded main floor below, whose seats were none too comfortable as well. In order to get a nice seat at nearly any event, attendence an hour early was necessary. On our cruise, events were scheduled, back to back to back. More than once we spent four consecutive hours in the Showroom, i.e., securing a seat, lecture, port talk, lecture.

While the HAL staff provided their usual excellent service, certain other operational decisions on this cruise were, in my opinion, poor, and hopefully won't translate to further cruises.

 

We were also on the 2015 VOV. I would agree about the scheduling and getting a seat. We found the balcony seats in the showroom just fine and chose to sit there most of the time....easy exit if you didn't like the show, lol. Would get a lower seat in the daytime for the lectures, etc., and that is where the scheduling thing came in.

We found the ship to be just fine and have scheduled the 48 day Amazon Explorer. We'd first been on the Veendam in 2007 before it was refurbished. Although we had a good cruise, the issues were there about condition at that time. I was thrilled with the 2015 condition of the ship and excellence of the crew and service. It's a great small ship in my opinion and I'm sorry to hear that it is scheduled to be sold.....if I recall correctly reading that here some time ago.

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As others here have pointed out, when the Veendam added additional aft cabins increasing the passenger capacity they did not (could not) increase the overall public space areas.

 

However, they did change the seating in the Showroom to include the small chairs and tables which may have increased the overall seating capacity. (?)

 

Agree and thanks for the reminder, the upholstered bench seating on the lower floor of the Showroom were not that comfortable -awkward seat hight for me - 5'5"' - lags dangled, back was too straight up. So we would also go for the chair seating up front which was fine for us.

 

We did not find either elevators, lido seating or lido lines to be crowded. But we also avoided key times of impact or usually took the stairs if it was only a two flights away upstairs to get where we needed to go.

 

Because we had so many port days on our Montreal-San Diego itinerary and did not stay up for the 10pm entertainment, we were not in the showroom often except for the port talks and the few enrichment lecture offerings on this particular port intensive collector cruise itinerary.

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We also just got off 28 days on the Veendam, we had a great time. Elevators were rarely crowded, always found a spot to eat at the Lido and, most importantly, the AC in the cabin worked well. Staff was excellent. I would sail again on her without hesitation.

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We were in one of those aft facing cabins on the Jan 2015 Panama Canal cruise and had a WONDERFUL time with no complaints. The food was fantastic and the main theater evening entertainment as well as the 2 lectures a day were well worth getting to the theater about 15-20 minutes early to get a good seat. But for us, we always get there early to get a good seat and play a few hands of gin before the show. But that has pretty much always been the case on HAL cruises for any good early show. BTW the upper level seats were fine, but not the greatest we've ever sat in. But if you go to the early show, you definitely want to come a little early if you want to get a good seat.

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