Zaandam

Zaandam is the younger of Holland America’s two R-class ships, the small pair described on Volendam’s page, laid down at Marghera in June 1998, delivered in April 2000 and christened that May by Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, who were thirteen. She is 61,396 tons and carries 1,432 guests. Where her sister was decorated around flowers, Zaandam was decorated around music, and the collection is genuinely odd: a Baroque-style Dutch pipe organ in the atrium, guitars signed by the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Carlos Santana and Queen hung through the stairwells, and a saxophone on one landing signed on the mouthpiece by Bill Clinton.

The joke that writes itself is that the most musical-looking ship in the fleet is one of the two without the Music Walk. There is no Rolling Stone Lounge and no Billboard Onboard aboard her. Shows and lectures happen in the Mondriaan Lounge, the Wajang Theater doubles as the Culinary Arts Center, and the live music is a piano bar and a band. The memorabilia is decor, not a program.

March 2020

She sailed from Buenos Aires on March 7, 2020 with 1,243 passengers and 586 crew, into a world that was closing. By the fourth week of the month scores of people aboard were sick, Chile had refused her, and Panama would not let her transit. Four passengers died at sea. The canal authority relented at the end of the month, her sister Rotterdam came alongside off Panama to pass over supplies and take on roughly 1,400 people with no symptoms, and the two ships were eventually allowed into Port Everglades in early April after a public argument over whether Florida would accept them. A crew member died in hospital afterward, bringing the toll to four passengers and one crew.

It is the worst thing that has happened to a Holland America ship in living memory and there is no version of her story that leaves it out. She returned to service in 2022 and has been working steadily since; her most recent drydock was two weeks in early 2025.

The other thing that happened to her

In April 2024 she positioned off the west coast of Mexico to put her passengers under the total solar eclipse, and the ship’s handling of it was good enough that the following July a main-belt asteroid, 277118, was named Zaandam in her honor. It is not a distinction many hotels afloat can claim.

Where she actually sails

Alaska, mostly, and more of it than her size suggests. She runs seven-night Inside Passage sailings roundtrip from Vancouver alongside one-way runs between Vancouver and Whittier for the Denali and Yukon land tours, and once a season she does an eighteen-day Great Bear Rainforest itinerary that works the British Columbia coast properly rather than sprinting north, the sort of thing only a 780-foot ship can be spared for.

In the autumn she moves south: a thirty-five-day Hawaii, Tahiti and Marquesas voyage roundtrip from San Diego in October 2027, Mexican Riviera sailings, Panama Canal transits, and then on January 30, 2028 she leaves San Diego on a ninety-day Grand Australia and New Zealand voyage. Holland America gave that itinerary to the two small ships on purpose, because they fit ports the rest of the fleet does not.

Who she suits

People who want the coast rather than the vessel; Alaska passengers who care which glaciers are on the manifest, and long-voyage cruisers who will take three months off. She is quiet, the crew ratio is generous at 647 to 1,432, and there is never a line.

She does not suit families, teenagers, or anyone who came for the live-music program Holland America advertises, because on this hull it does not exist. Her cabins are small, a minority have balconies, and she is twenty-six years old. What she offers instead is the itinerary.