Zaandam in Vancouver
Hits
Holland America Zaandam had lots of random seating near windows. Well maybe not so random as it’s mostly actually in bars or other venues, but still plenty of places to sit and watch the scenery go by.
crows nest front window seats at night
The Crows Nest lounge is a great place for relaxing by windows. It has full length windows across the front of the ship and lots of places to sit. There’s also a coffee bar in the room, and sometimes there are scheduled activities there.
movie theater
Besides the main theater there is a second small theater with several movie times daily.
Zaandam in Juneau
It’s a small ship so there’s not a huge crowd of people.
pork dinner
We didn’t try any of the specialty restaurants, but the food included in the cruise price was always good.
sale table at one of the ship’s shops
It was the last Alaska cruise of the season so all of the Alaska themed merchandise was 75% off. Not just things that said Alaska on them, but also things like really nice otherwise very expensive raincoats and other warm clothing, wooden Alaskan animal Christmas ornaments for just $3 each, and all sorts of other things. I got a Helly Hanson raincoat for $40 originally selling for $160. That’s a premium outdoor clothing brand. Weather this cruise definitely put our raingear to the test, and it passed with flying colors, where the one I’d brought from home definitely would have leaked.
best dessert of the cruise
The gift shop had ship model Christmas ornaments. Often they only have those around Christmas, and not always even then.
Zaandam Christmas ornament
The app worked better than most of the other lines we’ve been on recently. Most of the features actually worked how they were supposed to most of the time. The chat even alerted people when someone messaged them, which on some ships it doesn’t.
photo of the bowcam channel view in Endicott Arm with people on the upper and lower bows
The open area on the bow on deck 6 was open even when the main bow wasn’t so there was always that one space for an outside forward view.
The crew was friendly and helpful, and the stewards attentive.
main pool on the Lido deck
The ship had a sliding cover over the main lido deck pool and surrounding area. That was quite useful since it was cold and rainy on our cruise so that area was covered rather than out in the rain the whole cruise.
Disembarkation was quick and easy.
the lady in pink was the sole person from the Grand Princess
Some shore excursions were combined with people on Grand Princess so they didn’t have to cancel those excursions if there weren’t enough people from just one ship.
Misses
Smoking was allowed in the casino rather than being limited just to a small area of the open back deck like all of the other Holland America ships we were accustomed to sailing on. It only took one person smoking in the casino to have smoke wafting all the way up the stairs to other decks as well as into other areas on the same deck. Totally blew my image of Holland America. Before this cruise I thought Holland America didn’t allow indoor smoking on any of their ships anymore. I was quite disappointed to find out that after years of non-smoking interiors they started opening up the casinos to smoking on each ship as it went into drydock. One of the main reasons we sailed on Holland America so often was the smoke-free interior.
the casino was open to other areas and allowed smoking which spread around the ship
There are no self-serve guest laundries. There aren’t any on any Holland America ships so that’s not surprising, but I still consider it a miss.
They had the past guest event on boarding day during boarding hours with the notification buried under other paperwork in the cabin where anyone not expecting that would not likely find it before the event was over – those with a late boarding time may not even have boarded the ship until after it was over. On all our previous Holland America cruises they had a special mariner lunch for past guests, but this was just some sort of gathering. I don’t know exactly what because we didn’t find the invitation until the next day.
Disembarkation notices appeared in everyone’s seamail box on the day after we boarded the ship. We hadn’t even been to the first port yet. It felt like they were trying to get rid of us when we had barely got on the ship.
Vista Suite
The room air is the old style tied into a central system rather than individual to each room. You can’t turn it off, just up or down. It shows warm or cold options, but if the ship is on AC you can’t actually ever get warm air, just more or less cold. And it’s pretty noisy at night.
pool in the thermal suite
The thermal suite just has a not very warm hot tub sized mineral pool instead of a nice big warm pool with jets and things like their bigger ships have, but they price it like it was a bigger ship with better features.
dock in Juneau
They cancelled a bunch of shore excursions in Juneau without notifying anyone. Excursions get cancelled for bad weather, not enough participants, or if the excursion provider bails on it, but normally they send out some sort of notification as soon as they know. In Juneau nobody whose excursion got cancelled knew about it until they went out to the meeting place on the dock at the scheduled excursion time to check in for it.
duck in the bottom of a music themed table
There were very few duck hiders on this ship and the majority of other passengers we talked to had no idea it was even a thing. Which is of course not the ship’s fault since that’s something passengers do on their own.
bread lobster decoration at the breakfast buffet
They did not make any fresh gluten free things in the buffet, only re-heating or handing out pre-made stuff. In the dining room if you wanted something as simple as gluten free pancakes at breakfast you had to order it the night before.
sailing past the entrance to Tracy Arm
Tracy Arm was on the itinerary, but we just sailed past it on the way to Juneau with no explanation of why we didn’t go there.
Even though the weather outside was cold, the inside temperature of the ship was very cold like they had AC on the whole time instead of heat. When it’s cold and rainy outside it would be nice if the ship was warm on the inside.
Canada Place
The embarkation line through security at Canada Place was combined with other ships so it was quite long. That’s a port thing rather than a ship thing, but such long lines were unexpected when boarding a small ship. Most of the people in that line were heading to the Grand Princess, which holds nearly twice as many passengers as the Zaandam.
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