Noordam

Noordam is the fourth and last of the Vista class, launched at Fincantieri Marghera in April 2005 and christened in February 2006. Holland America moved on to the slightly larger Signature class after her. She is the odd one out on paper by a few hundred tons and a handful of berths, and the real difference between her and her sisters is where the line points her. She is the Asia ship.

The Asia season

From September through April she works out of Yokohama, Hong Kong and Singapore on thirteen- to fifteen-day sailings, most of them fourteen. The itineraries include Circle Japan routings calling at as many as ten Japanese ports, three of which (Hitachinaka, Nagoya and Maizuru) Holland America added new for the 2027–28 season, and overnight stays at Halong Bay, Seoul, Bangkok, Manila, Osaka and Shanghai. Overnights are the part worth paying for; a Japanese or Vietnamese port at nine in the evening is a different place than the same port at two in the afternoon.

Her size does actual work here. At 936 feet and 82,318 tons she can take Jeju in South Korea and Boracay in the Philippines, which the current generation of 4,000-guest ships cannot, and the line says so openly in its own materials.

Summer at the other end of the map

Come spring she repositions across the Pacific and spends the season on seven-day Alaska Explorer sailings roundtrip from Seattle. Once a year she does something much stranger: a twenty-eight-day voyage out of Seattle timed to the summer solstice that crosses the Arctic Circle. Every Holland America Alaska cruise includes at least one of Glacier Bay, Hubbard Glacier, Dawes Glacier or Endicott Arm, and the line backs that with a written guarantee, a detail that tells you how much of the Alaska business is glacier-driven.

Aboard

The music rooms are the Vista-class standard: the World Stage, the Rolling Stone Lounge that took over from B.B. King’s in 2023, Billboard Onboard at two pianos, and the Dam Band playing the Ocean Bar. The resident Lincoln Center quartets are gone fleetwide and now tour as a rotating act.

She carries both Asian restaurants (Tamarind, the pan-Asian room, and Morimoto By Sea) which on an Asia deployment is either apt or slightly redundant depending on your view. There is also a Library Café, a pickleball court with a view over the rail, and a Lido pool under a roof that slides back, which matters more in the North Pacific than it does in the Caribbean. She had two weeks in drydock over November and December 2024 and is on the list for Holland America Evolution, the $500 million rebuild that begins with Oosterdam in 2027.

Who she suits

People booking Asia for the ports rather than the ship, and people who want fourteen nights rather than seven. The passenger demographic skews old, the pace is unhurried, and a sea day here means a lecture, a book and a band at six.

She does not suit families, she does not suit anyone who wants a big-ship attraction list, and she does not suit travelers who want to be off the ship at dawn every morning; this is a line that builds sea days into its itineraries on purpose. She is also twenty years old, competently maintained rather than gleaming, and her rebuild has not been scheduled.