Photos from Prinsendam Circle South America (Jan 3, 2008)

[bobnsandi]

Would you explain this further, please? The Internet Center was supposed to have been moved and incorporated into an Explorations Cafe. Wasn't it moved?

In what way was it a "disgrace"?

Actually, I liked it just fine when I was aboard last summer. There were a lot of stations, with a variety of angles to the windows, and some "stations" for lap-tops users to sit.

The Internet Manager was good, and that's always helpful.

What I never figured out was if one could access the New York Times for free, since it had not been converted to "Powered by the NY Times".

 

 

The library/internet cafe were very nice. Certainly comfortable, as we saw a lot of people sitting in the chairs fast asleep. The book selection was excellent, and the cruise staff did a good job handling our many requests.

 

The coffee bar area was comfortable, but we never sat there, because the big-screen TV seemed to be showing non-stop soccer for the entire cruise. The noise from the TV often carried over into the library sitting area. The coffee and cookies at the bar were great.

 

Regarding the internet capabilities on the ship, this was our biggest gripe against an otherwise wonderful cruise. Even in the cafe area, the wireless connectivity was terrible. We were disconnected randomly and lost a lot of productivity, since we would have to start all over with the process we were performing. We were not the only users who suffered from these problems. Naturally, the fixed machines in the library area did not suffer from the wireless issues.

 

Regardless of the connectivity issues, the overall internet speed was dreadful. After a while, we learned that the entire ship, including crew, staff, and passengers, had to squeeze through a 256KB "pipe" to the outside world. For this we were charged a lot of money. The issue was that doing even the simplest action, such as checking email, would take a minimum of 30-60 minutes, time spent mostly waiting for responses. Note that we were charged connect time, even if no bits were passing between the machine and the internet. Some people we talked with had racked up huge bills for internet. Incidentally, we found that working between 11 PM and 4 AM had the best thruput, but that was still not good.

 

When confronted about these issues, the internet staff was evasive and lied outright to us. The worst response from them was "no one else has complained about this". That was a total lie, since we talked with many, many other cruisers who were having problems, getting no relief, and paying a lot of money. In the end, our gripe was that someone was charging for this terrible service at all.

 

After a while, we looked everywhere on shore for internet cafes. In South America, they were often quite cheap. The time spent taking care of internet matters on shore cut into our "tourist" time, of course.

 

Now, there are many "reasons" for this lamentable situation, all of which can be debated endlessly. Suffice to say, we made our displeasure very clear to Holland America on behalf of ourselves, and our fellow CruiseCritic passengers.

[RuthC]

Thank you for the information, but I'm afraid I'm still not following. What "upgrades" was the Internet Center supposed to have that it didn't have? :confused:

From what you posted it was moved and incorporated into the Explorations Cafe.

I've found the Internet connections to be slow on every ship I've sailed, and didn't find the one on the Prinsendam any worse than the others.