All the boys of the RSVP charter disembarked today and it took quite a while to accomplish this. With so many ships in port the CBP were hard stretched to cope with all those 1000’s of guests, but the few officers available coped admirably with what came rolling off the gangway. Embarkation could still start on time and thus all was well in the world. Even all our new guests made it to the ship as far as I know, at least those who were using a form of Holland America Line organized transport. We can keep track of those and thus we know if they are stuck somewhere and delayed. If operationally possible the Captain can then hold the ship while shore and port operations try to get them on board ASAP. If guests are travelling by their own arrangements it becomes much more difficult as we do not know what transport they are using, where they are staying or that they are even on the way. Some guests who run into delays contact our head office which in turn then contacts the ship and the terminal people but often we have so called “independents” missing and there is nothing we can do about it.

18 feb We are now starting a 7 day East Caribbean Cruise with calls at Grand Turk, San Juan, St Thomas and Half Moon Cay. Then next cruise we call at St.Maarten instead of at St. Thomas. The Nieuw Amsterdam will remain on these sorts of cruises until it starts the Transcanal and sails to the West Coast for the Alaska season. The place of the N.A for the Europe Season will be taken over by Koningsdam.  This seems to be a sort of established pattern ever since the construction of the Vista Class started. The newest ship sails Europe in the summer and once it becomes the 2nd newest ship it is assigned to Alaska. It will be interesting to see when the TBA –Dam comes out, if the Koningsdam will then go to Alaska as well. The only exception is the Eurodam which stays in Europe and that makes sense because of the name.

This brings me to the way the cruises are created/selected/ designed or better said decided upon. This is a whole extensive process which takes at least two years to complete. Because of this it is very difficult for HAL, or any company to quickly change a cruise. If political or health situations demand that certain countries are removed from the schedule, then cancelling is easy but redesigning the cruise is a pure headache.

What the guests suggest takes two to three years to work into the schedule for one of the ships. The biggest challenges are the port reservations. If you want to have a dock, especially in the smaller ports, then you have to be early and if there are more ships then the biggest one that fits, or the most senior ship on the run from last season will have preference.  So if you are in the seniority group then you try to keep that port in your cruise set-up for the next year or even the one after. Thus if we have to cancel somewhere, or pull out of the schedule for a prolonged time,  then the easiest alternative is to cruise to some larger ports where there will most likely be a dock available.

To give an example, if we would have to cancel Civitavecchia /Rome for a season then Livorno would always work as there is always ample dock space. Even if it would mean docking at a container dock.  If Livorno would not be in the proximity of Civitavecchia , then the nearest alternative would be Elba. That is an anchor port but with only two anchor spaces.  So if 5 ships had to omit Civitavecchia from the schedule who would get Elba??

The next important thing is the size of the ship:  Will it fit in? Therefore it is great to have a Prinsendam in the fleet, it fits nearly everywhere. Also it is one of the reasons Holland America does not want to go too big in their ships size as it severely limits the ports you can visit. Just compare the world cruise schedule for 2016 between the Queen Mary and our Amsterdam. Some ports are the same, some definitely not.

So tomorrow we are at sea and it will be interesting to watch the weather. A depression is coming over which will hit Florida tomorrow  and it is supposed to bring rain. For us it will be interesting to see what sort of weather it leaves behind while we sail for Grand Turk.