So many factors come into play in situations like this, and I completely understand why a poor response from HAL would drive your business elsewhere. Just to even the scales a bit, we had an experience with them that was the complete opposite. We were on an 11-day cruise, in the midst of which we spent 3 days sailing through a terrible storm. It was raining so hard, and the rain was being blown sideways, such that water was leaking through the balcony doors into our room (and my parents' next to ours). Nothing about it was HAL's fault, and we never complained. Our cabin steward noticed the problem and had engineering try several fixes including putting portable blowers in the room to try to dry the carpet. Through it all, we just chalked it up to life at sea. Imagine our surprise about a week after the cruise when both my parents and I got very nice letters from HAL apologizing for the inconvenience and fully refunding 25% of our respective cruise fares!

My parents never sailed another line again--HAL cemented themselves as a stand-up company who put guest service ahead of the bottom line. And while I've strayed a bit (taking three Disney cruises since), we just completed another HAL cruise and still consider them a top choice based largely on our treatment on that one, wet cruise.