Volendam

Volendam is the older of the two small ships Holland America still runs, and the argument for her existing at all is geographic. At 61,214 tons and 780 feet she gets up the St. Lawrence to Montreal and into harbors that the line’s 100,000-ton hulls have to skip. Holland America says as much in its own press releases: when it assigned the 2028 world cruise, it picked Volendam and Zaandam because they reach ports larger ships cannot. That is the whole case, and it is a good one.

The R class

Four ships, built at Fincantieri Marghera between 1997 and 2000: Rotterdam, Volendam, Zaandam and Amsterdam. Volendam was ordered in 1996, keel laid in February 1998, launched that September and delivered in October 1999. The two outer sisters are gone, Fred. Olsen bought them in 2020 and renamed them Borealis and Bolette, leaving Volendam and Zaandam as the last of the type in the fleet.

They are ten passenger decks of ship rather than twelve or more, with 1,432 guests against nearly two thousand on a Vista hull, and the proportions show in the public rooms: a main dining room stacked over two levels, a full wraparound teak promenade, and no interior mall. Each ship was given a decorative theme. Volendam’s is flowers, and it runs from the carpets to the stairwells to Luciano Vistosi’s three-deck glass sculpture standing in the atrium.

What has been done to her

More than most twenty-six-year-old ships. In 2006 her superstructure was extended forward and a proper spa, gym and children’s room went in. In 2014 the casino bar, piano bar and Seaview Lounge were rebuilt into a single room called the Mix, and twenty-one cabins were converted into lanai staterooms, the ones that open straight onto the Promenade Deck, still unique to her in this fleet. Her suites were redone at Freeport in 2019, and she came out of a roughly eight-million-dollar refit in November 2024.

Between all that, in the spring of 2022, the City of Rotterdam chartered her as housing for Ukrainian refugees. She sat in her home port doing that job, staffed by Holland America crew, until the middle of September.

What she does not have

She and Zaandam are the two ships in the fleet without the Music Walk. There is no Rolling Stone Lounge and no Billboard Onboard here; entertainment is the Frans Hals Lounge for production shows and lectures, the Wajang Theater doubling as the Culinary Arts Center, a piano bar, and the Crow’s Nest at the top of the ship. If you are booking Holland America specifically for the live-music program, book one of the bigger ships. Dining is better represented; the Rotterdam Restaurant, the Pinnacle Grill, Canaletto and Morimoto By Sea are all aboard.

Where she actually sails

Autumn and summer she works Canada and New England on seven- to fourteen-night sailings out of Boston and Montreal, including a fourteen-day run up from Fort Lauderdale, plus the thirty-five-day Voyage of the Vikings roundtrip from Boston in July, Greenland, Iceland and Norway on a ship of this size, which is the sort of itinerary she exists for. Then on January 4, 2028 she leaves Fort Lauderdale on the 129-day Grand World Voyage and does not come back until May. She is also in the 2028 Europe deployment.

Who she suits

Experienced cruisers, and people who count ports rather than amenities. A sixty-day segment of a world cruise is a normal booking on this ship, the median sailing in her book is over two weeks, and the average age aboard reflects it.

She does not suit families, she does not suit anyone who needs variety on a sea day, and she does not suit a first-time cruiser looking for a lot of ship for the money. Her hull dates from 1998 and the refits have not hidden it: the cabins are small by current standards, the balconies are fewer, and the interior is a 1990s ship dressed up several times over.