Koningsdam

Koningsdam was the first Pinnacle-class ship, handed over by Fincantieri at Marghera on 31 March 2016, and she is the hull where Holland America worked out what it wanted its modern ships to be. Nieuw Statendam and Rotterdam followed in 2018 and 2021 with the same dimensions and the same layout. If you have sailed one of them you have essentially sailed this one, with the caveat that first-of-class ships tend to accumulate the small awkwardnesses that later hulls get to fix.

She is also the first ship in a 150-year-old company to be named after a person rather than a place. Koningsdam means, roughly, king’s dam; the name honors King Willem-Alexander, and Queen Máxima christened her at Rotterdam in May 2016. Every other ship in this fleet ends in -dam because it is named for a Dutch harbor or a compass direction.

What she established

The Pinnacle design put live music at the center of the ship rather than in a corner of it, and it started here: a run of small music rooms on two decks, a main theater wrapped in a curved LED screen, and no rock wall, no zip line and no water park anywhere. At just under 100,000 tons and 2,650 guests she is mid-sized on purpose, around 40 percent of the tonnage of the largest ships now sailing, carrying under half the passengers.

The music rooms have not stayed still. Holland America spent 2025 and 2026 taking the Music Walk apart as a fixed four-venue format: the Lincoln Center Stage quartet that played every ship every night is gone, replaced by a rotating act, and live music has been pushed out into more of the ship instead. She keeps the full-size Rolling Stone Rock Room with a five-piece band, which among the Holland America fleet only she, Nieuw Statendam and Rotterdam have; the older ships get the smaller Rolling Stone Lounge.

The 2026 dry dock

She spent two weeks at Grand Bahama Shipyard in Freeport in March 2026, her first dry dock in three years, and came out on 29 March. Five ocean-view cabins were added that sleep four, twenty-two existing Vista Suites got sofa beds, and the connecting space between Billboard Onboard and the Rolling Stone room was opened up with more seating so people can move between sets. The casino was enlarged, the gym re-equipped, and Pinnacle Grill, Sel de Mer and Club Orange were converted from fixed tables to flexible seating that can take larger parties. It was a tidy-up rather than a reinvention, timed to land before the Alaska season.

Where she sails

The Pacific, and only the Pacific. She repositioned from the Caribbean to Vancouver through the Panama Canal in the spring of 2026 and has stayed on the west coast since. Summers are seven-night Alaska Inside Passage round trips from Vancouver, with one-way sailings connecting through Anchorage for people doing a cruisetour into Denali. Winters she works out of San Diego on the Mexican Riviera and on the long Hawaii runs, which are the outliers in her schedule at up to five weeks. She is the only ship in Holland America’s mid-size fleet that does not cross the Atlantic at all.

Who she suits

Alaska, mostly. She is the right size for it, small enough to be manageable in Glacier Bay and the fjords, big enough to have somewhere warm and indoor to sit when it rains, which it will. The observation lounge at the bow is the most useful room on the ship in that part of the world and she is built around looking out of it.

She does not suit families with young children in any season; the youth facilities are token and the demographic aboard skews old enough that nobody pretends otherwise. She does not suit anyone who wants to be entertained by the ship itself rather than by what is outside it. And if you are choosing between her and her two sisters on features alone, do not bother; pick the itinerary, because the ships are the same ship.