azalice

My spouse just pointed out my error in my original question when I said we had a noisy cabin on the Ryndam. We were not on that ship. We were on the Veendam when our cabin creaked a lot and kept us awake.

Thank you all for your responses about the Prinsendam.

Having had bad experience on Ryndam inside cabin having very creaky, noisy walls and ceiling once ship was moving, we are concerned about the Prinsendam. Has anyone experienced their inside or ocean view cabins having noise problems as I described on our Ryndam cabin in May this year.

On the Ryndam, staff came in twice and shored up the wall/ceiling and it helped a bit but not enough. It interrupted sleeping while sailing.

We are considering the Prinsendam next summer or fall but do not want the same issues on an older ship.

We have taken 5 cruises on HAL with the 6th coming soon. When I do a review for a different site, I am used to writing a paragraph or two as a summary of the experience. Cruise reviews seem to be quite long and detailed, and I am not used to or interested in doing more than quick summaries. Therefore, I have never done a cruise review for any cruise line.

We do not normally get off the ship until about 10am. That may be later than many others seeking licensed taxis. Do you think licensed taxi/guides will still be available at that time of the morning or should we plan to do advance hiring of a taxi? We are on the Veendam May 2 sailing.

azalice on Veendam May 2

We have flown Icelandair several times out of JFK going to Europe. Each time we arrived at almost midnight, took a taxi to a Keflik hotel, slept, had hotel breakfast about 9am, left hotel at about noon, caught a 4pm flight to Europe. So, staying overnight worked well for us as long as the next days flight time worked out.

We gave up the idea of upgrades because our one and only upgrade was to a cabin over a galley, usually keeping me awake until about midnight (past my bedtime). We now always choose the cabin we want and take no upgrades.

We used Icelandair last summer and will use them again summer 2011. The price was so good that we upgraded to premium economy and it still cost much less than coach seats to Heathrow on other airlines. The only issue was that the premium economy seats are the wider, better seats for one leg of the trip only. On our second leg, there actually are no premium economy seats (only first class so very expensive); the airline handles the issue by apparently boarding up the middle seat in the row of three and my DH and I will have the window and aisle seats to ourselves. Very strange; not exactly what we hoped for but it was the best we could do with this airline on our two stage trip to Heathrow.

Alice