Zuiderdam vs. Island Princess

[izmackar]

Hi Everyone -

 

I'm posting this on the HAL board as well as the Princess board in the hopes of getting a good cross section of feedback. Truth be told, we are leaning Princess for a Panama Canal cruise this Christmas. The lure of a full canal transit is winning the day, but I am curious to hear others' opinions before we seal the deal. My husband is a young 67 and I am 50. We are not big partiers, but enjoy a good time. Also, we are wise enough to know that fine cuisine at sea is a misnomer when feeding so many people. As long as the food isn't as bad as the cruise we had on NCL, we have the proper expectations that dining on the mass market ships shouldn't be considered gourmet by any means.

 

We enjoyed a Mexican Riviera cruise on HAL 2 years ago but found it to be a really older crowd, despite HAL's attempts to market otherwise. The activities were definitely geared towards that demographic. When we sailed the Grand Princess out of Galveston, it was a great time, but clearly very heavy on the children factor, especially since it was the holidays. When the ship had some issues that caused us to be late into port, some people seemed to get pretty obnoxious, too. Last year we did the Celebrity Summit and, while good, didn't wow me.

 

I thought that once we did our "cruise buffet" over the past few years, the choice would be more clear, but it's not. Can anyone point to plusses of HAL vs. Princess that I may be missing? HAL's Canal itinerary is not full transit, so is a R/T from FLL. For Princess, we'll fly to Acapulco and sail to FLL. The ports sound interesting on the princess itinerary, too, since we've done most of the HAL ports already.

 

Any pearls of wisdom out there? Thanks!

[Joy2theWorld]

I have no input on the ships as we'll be on the Zuiderdam in a few weeks, but I can highly recommend the full transit. We did it with Disney last year and it truly was an event. Our favorite port was Cartagena, Colombia by far. Aruba was next. We could have done without the Mexican Riviera.

[wwinfl91]

We have been on both the Island Princess and the Zuiderdam and greatly enjoyed both ships. Because you are considering a Panama Canal cruise I would lean towards recommending the one on the Island Princess because it is a full transit of the Canal. We have done two full transits, one west to east and then our last one on the Zuiderdam east to west. You really get a better picture of the canal and its history when you do the full transit and see all the locks rather than the single set of locks (IMHO).

 

As far as ships go as I said we did a 15 day Hawaiian cruise on the Island several years ago and really liked the ship and would go on it again if it was going on an itinerary we wanted to go on. We were just on the Zuiderdam this spring for an 18 day Panama Canal cruise and again really enjoyed the ship and the cruise.

 

Now that HAL has implimented "any time evening dining" similar to Princess's "personal choice dining" which we really like the two cruise lines are really much more similar. The average ages on a HAL cruise will tend to be older than a Princess cruise where you should find a more mixed age group. But the longer the cruise the older the crowd as we found on a 14 day Tahiitian Princess cruise to Alaska where the age group more matched a typical HAL cruise.

 

We like the food on both cruise lines but generally find the food on HAL tends to be less seasoned (very little salt especially) than Princess. Both have great specialty extra charge restaurants that we always try to go to at least once during the cruise. We enjoyed the Zuiderdam's Lido restaurants for both breakfast and lunches but the same could be said for the Island Princess.

 

We have tended to try to find cruises that go to ports we haven't already visited especially in the Caribbean where we have cruised a lot so the itineraries of the two cruises may be your decision point.

 

As I said earlier I would go for the Island Princess with a full transit.

 

Have a great next cruise.

[haro]

We have been TO the canal and THROUGH the canal--if you can go THROUGH, you definitely should.