We too are 4-star HAL Mariners having started with them back in 1994. We too have had enough in terms of the cuts and changes. Case in point is your mention of what we consider the gradual demise of the Crow’s Nest as our favorite evening venue. Back in 1994 HAL had a 4 or 5 piece staff band that would start playing around 7 PM. We’d go there before dinner and enjoy a drink and the hors d’ouevers the bar staff would wheel around on a cart. After dinner we’d eventually go back to the Crow’s Nest and finish the night off dancing and enjoying the band until close to closing. By 1998 the staff band was gone but they had replaced them with a contract band so no big change there. The hors d’ouevers were still available but no cart and you had to ask for them. By 2004 the band was gone and they had a piano playing before dinner and maybe a single piano or guitar player after dinner. By 2007 no piano player before dinner but still maybe a DJ playing prerecorded music after dinner. By 2011 the Crow’s Nest was no big deal with virtually no entertainment and virtually empty at night. My time frames might be off a year here or there and it may have differed from ship to ship or cruise to cruise but that was the general demise of the Crow’s Nest to what had been a once very popular nightclub-like venue. HAL’s conclusion was the Crow’s Nest wasn’t pulling its weight as a money making venue so they have or are slowly but surely turning it into the Internet center, business center, and cruise research area. I can’t speak to how well that has been accepted or how it well it works but it doesn’t interest us.

Truth is is we gave up on HAL in 2012 and haven’t been back and have no plans to try then again. There’s a lot more to our decision than the changes in the Crow’s Nest, more than I want to lay out here. HAL is still pretty popular and I guess they still offer a fairly quality experience for the fare. They certainly have a very good variety and selection of itineraries and that attracts a lot of passengers. By no means am I saying it’s a bad product just that it isn’t a product that attracts us or now meets our needs and expectations.

Interesting you haven’t sailed with HAL since 2008. That’s about the same time we started to really notice changes that impacted us. Admittedly, a few years break in between, we tried HAL a couple of more times and finally gave HAL up in 2011 to the point where we dropped a 2012 booking with them.

For sure ship size was one of the factors that caused us to go away from HAL. We cruised on the then pretty new Oosterdam in 2004. Didn’t like the size so our next few cruises were on the smaller Voolendam, Veendam, and Maasdam. Like many of the mass market lines HAL continued, and actually continues, to build bigger and bigger ships and is unloading the now old smaller ships. Another brick in the wall for any chance if us returning to HAL.

My wife and I are probably guilty of staying with a line too long, like probably three to four years too long. A lot of things went into the decision that seemed valid at the time but not so much in retrospect. At the time we finally had reached the number of cruise days where the passenger loyalty program started to really show some benefit. Our cruise focus at the time had been escaping winters in the frozen north so we cruised almost exclusively in the Caribbean. We were a bit younger and our interests were different. We thought our real escape would mean looking at luxury lines and at the time those lines didn’t compete well cost wise for Caribbean cruises. It was only when we started considering more distant cruises like the Med that the possibility to upgrade to luxury lines really started to make sense. Made the leap in 2012 and will probably never go back to our mass market line.

Kind of hard to fully understand the exact relationship....what I would call the chain of command using my military background....between Holland America and Seabourn. From what I can tell Carnival Corporation has a subgroup called the Holland America Group that includes the Holland America, Princess, Seabourn, and P&O Australia lines. There is a group CEO and each line has its own president that reports to him. Supposedly these were all pulled together to cut management overhead and consolidated in Seattle to share common staff operations. Might be splitting hairs but the use of Holland America as the group name and as one of the cruise lines probably causes some misunderstanding.