If you’ve been reading my blog as we traveled you will understand that we had a great time. There were some real disappointments with the Rotterdam that I wanted to vent about a bit. This is the first time I’ve written a closing thoughts note.
Closing Thoughts
That’s about the last of the travel related stuff. It’s time for some reflections on the trip.
First of all, the QM2 is still the QM2. The classiest way to get to and from Europe. The food is great, the internet works (more on that later), the ship is very stable in bad weather and the staff is warm, competent and courteous.
A more mixed bag is sadly the case with HAL’s ms Rotterdam. The ship is fine, it went into a long dry-dock just after we got off but it was still in great condition. The staff is excellent! Unfortunately the Head Office seems to be letting the onboard employees down. I say that for several reasons.
First, and by far the most important, is the internet onboard. They had MTN, the same provider as the QM2. I’ve been using shipboard internet for over 10 years and the service on the Rotterdam is the worst I’ve ever seen. They gave up MTN for a new ISP and one of three things has to be true: 1. They went cheap on the contract and consequently are getting rotten service. 2. They are not getting the service they contracted for. Or 3. If they didn’t go cheap and are getting the service they contracted for, whoever negotiated the contract did a terrible job.
The worst part of it is that the onboard personnel are helpless to do anything about it. The service is what it is and all they can do is make excuses for it. Apparently HAL and Seaborne went together on this deal and the head network guy is a Seaborne employee with absolutely awful English skills. When the local people couldn’t answer my questions they emailed him and the email he sent in response is a joke. I’m giving him a break by saying that the problem with the email was his English skills because if I don’t look at it that way he was just plain lying.
Every provider I have ever had on board a ship has given me an SMTP so I could use my Outlook App to access my Charter email account. MTN on the QM2 both on the crossing before the HAL cruise and after the HAL cruise gave me an SMTP and my Outlook App worked flawlessly. When HAL ships had MTN they did the same thing. This is in complete opposition to the HAL/Seaborne Internet Manager’s assertion that providing me with an SMTP for his system would be a large security risk. Since I’ve been home I have done some research on this matter and can find no instance where giving a user the ISP’s SMTP has proved to be any problem for the service. MTN has been doing this for years and they have not experienced any problems because of it. This reinforces my position that the manager was either lying to me or failed to communicate his ideas to me because of his poor English skills.
To add insult to injury my backup email method, and old AOL account would not work on the HAL system either. I’m pretty sure that was because the network ‘timeout’ was so short that an old ISP like AOL did not connect quickly enough and the HAL system shut the connection down. Again, with MTN on the QM2 my AOL account worked all the time without any problem. The HAL internet people tried to tell me that the fault was with my AOL program and that I should update it or download a more current version. Yeah, that would have been a moneymaker for the HAL ISP and HAL. As slow as onboard internet service is it would have cost me about $100 to download a new AOL program. I’d like to hear HAL’s explanation of why AOL worked flawlessly on MTN and would rarely work on the HAL system. Consequently for weeks at a time I would not be able to use the Rotterdam’s internet to send email.
This is just the beginning of the problems with the new HAL ISP. The system tells you that you have connected to the internet when in fact you have not. The result is that you try to look at web pages or send email and nothing happens. Of course, because things are usually slow on shipboard internet you don’t realize you have no connection until you have wasted many expensive internet minutes. Here’s the bottom line. I usually buy a 1,000 minute internet package when I take longer cruises and I usually have about 150-200 minutes left over to use on the last few days of the trip. This time I used up the 1,100 initial minutes and purchased another 500 minutes and used most of that during the cruise. Looking back over the usage during the cruise it appears that about one third of my minutes were used trying to use the system when in fact it was down or trying to connect to AOL to send email.
The short version of the HAL internet summary is that THE CURRENT SYSTEM IS UNACCEPTABLE and they should either demand that the current ISP deliver the service they are paying for or return to MTN. In any case, the contract with the current ISP should be evaluated by an impartial third party to see if the promises match the performance. If they do then some corrective action should be taken with regard to the negotiation and signing of the contract. If they don’t the contract should be seen a breached and a new contract with MTN should be signed immediately. If their intention is to provide only internet lite to grandmas with tablets that want to send short emails to the grandchildren their promotional materials should reflect that. On longer cruises I use the internet to publish this blog, get and pay my bills and communicate with vendors and others. This is really hard when the system works the way it did on the Rotterdam. Apparently HAL is familiar with this issue as on last year’s World Cruise they refunded everyone ½ of the price for their internet service. I don’t think the service has improved any but they’ve got their excuses prepared now and the bottom line is that the problem is with the system but their excuses blame the user. Unfortunately, if you actually understand how networks, the Internet and ISPs function you can ask questions for which they do not have a canned excuse and the explanations you get to those inquiries either make no sense whatsoever or seem to be stabs in the dark that sound good but actually mean nothing.
I can only hope that the new lousy ISP does not spread to the rest of Carnival’s holdings. If anyone at Cunard is listening, DO NOT ALLOW THEM TO TALK YOU INTO CHANGING ISPS. The one you have is the best.
I said I had several reasons to be disappointed in the ms Rotterdam. Since I went on so long about the internet I’ll keep them short. Whoever is managing the onboard supply inventories is not doing a good job. Every HAL ship, any ship for that matter, has always had decaf tea. We had it for a few weeks and then after that none. For some reason during the cruise they quit brewing decaf coffee and instead brought it in from somewhere and served it from large coffee urns. It tasted terrible. I think it was filtered through dirty socks from the laundry. Just smelling it made me a little nauseated. So your choice of decaf drinks with no calories was water. They ran out of caffeine free Diet Coke but finally got some Diet Sprite.
In sum, the ship’s workers were first class as usual, the managers were a different story. Some were excellent but others need some remedial training.
I’m not telling you anything I have not told HAL directly. They now send you an email with a link to an evaluation. They heard about most of this then. For the first time in about 12 years we are back from a cruise and have not booked one for the future. Part of that can be attributed to a bit of travel burnout but at least some of it is due to our lack of confidence in HAL to deliver the product that has been their standard in the past.
All this aside, we did enjoy the cruise. Visited many unusual ports, saw some fantastic things and met some wonderful people. You can relax now, no more surprise travel emails.
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