Nieuw Amsterdam

Nieuw Amsterdam is the second of Holland America’s two Signature-class ships, launched at Marghera in October 2009, delivered on 30 June 2010 and christened at Venice four days later by the then Princess Máxima of the Netherlands. She is the fourth ship in the company’s history to carry the name. The class is described on her sister Eurodam’s page and there is no point repeating it: the two ships are the same design, two years apart, and Nieuw Amsterdam is 427 tons larger and a foot longer, which is a rounding difference rather than a change.

What separates them is what has been put aboard since, and where each one is sent.

Morimoto By Sea

In December 2023 she came out of a two-week dry dock with a permanent Morimoto restaurant, the first ocean-going restaurant Masaharu Morimoto has put his name to on a permanent basis, as opposed to the one-night pop-ups Holland America runs in the Pinnacle Grill or Tamarind on other ships. It is a multi-course Asian menu built around seafood, at $55 a head plus gratuity, and it is the one thing aboard this ship that is genuinely not available on any of her fleetmates.

The rest of that dry dock was maintenance: carpets throughout, windows replaced, automatic doors fitted for accessibility, an espresso machine put into the Lido buffet. Her music room is the Rolling Stone Lounge, the smaller format the Vista and Signature ships carry, not the full Rock Room found on the three Pinnacle hulls.

A schedule with no home

Most ships in this fleet have a summer port and a winter port. Nieuw Amsterdam has a circuit. She works Alaska out of Vancouver, then transits the Panama Canal to reach the Mediterranean and runs out of Piraeus and Civitavecchia, then comes back across for winters at Fort Lauderdale, and does the whole thing again. Roughly a quarter of her sailings are Panama Canal transits, which for most ships would be a repositioning inconvenience and for her is a substantial part of the product.

The consequence is that her bookings run long. Four nights at the bottom end and forty-one at the top, with a typical sailing around a fortnight. Anyone booking her end-to-end for a season is on board for months, and Holland America sells that deliberately.

She is also on the Evolution list, the $500 million program that will rebuild all four Vista ships and both Signature ships with solo verandah cabins, new suite categories and a Grand Dutch Café, starting with Oosterdam in fall 2027. No date has been announced for her. Until then she is a 2010 ship that has been refreshed but not rebuilt.

The honest caveats

She has had a rough decade mechanically and operationally. She grounded at Huatulco in 2017, collided with her fleetmate Oosterdam at Vancouver in 2019, and lost a port call in the southern Caribbean in early 2023 to an Azipod failure. Azipod trouble recurs across the Vista and Signature generation, but it is the kind of fault that changes your itinerary after you have booked it, and it is worth knowing that the class has a history of it.

Who she suits

People who want a long voyage on a mid-size ship and who are choosing on the route rather than the vessel. Her Mediterranean and Panama Canal programs are the reason to book her; the ship is comfortable and unremarkable and will not get in the way. Anyone who eats seriously should book Morimoto By Sea early, because on a 2,106-guest ship a single small restaurant fills up.

She does not suit families; there are children aboard in the Alaska season and almost none the rest of the year. She does not suit anyone who wants the newest Holland America product, which is a Pinnacle hull. And a forty-one-night sailing is a different thing entirely from a two-week one, and if you have not done one before, book something shorter on her first.