Who is actually on board

Outside school holidays, mostly retired couples and a lot of repeat guests. In school holidays, considerably more families than the reputation suggests, particularly in Alaska and the Caribbean.

I will be honest about what this means. If you bring two small children on a January Caribbean sailing they may be among very few children on the ship. Some kids love that. They get treated like minor royalty by every crew member and passenger on board. Some kids are bored by it.

The upside nobody mentions is that older passengers are overwhelmingly kind to well-behaved children. My youngest had about forty grandparents by the end of one week.

The music is genuinely a reason to go

Holland America made a decision years ago to take live music seriously rather than to cut it, and they stuck with it. There is a proper blues club, a classical ensemble, a dance orchestra, and a room built around the Rolling Stones catalogue.

This sounds like a small thing. It is not. On most ships the evening entertainment is one big production show and then a lounge singer. Here you can spend a week going to genuinely good live music in four different rooms, which changes what an evening at sea feels like.

Children are welcome in most of these spaces early in the evening, and a ten year old watching a real blues band at close range is a better memory than another round of trivia.

Alaska, and the other serious itineraries

Like Princess, Holland America has deep Alaska history and its own land operation, so cruise and land packages hold together properly. The naturalists on board are good and the scenic cruising is handled with care.

They also run a lot of the longer, more unusual itineraries. Northern Europe, the Panama Canal, long repositioning voyages and full world cruises. This is a line that goes places rather than circling the same three islands.

If you are the kind of traveller who reads the port list before the ship list, Holland America deserves a look.

The ships

Mid-sized and comfortable. Not enormous, not tiny, laid out conventionally and easy to learn. There is a lot of wood and there are a lot of proper armchairs, and there is an actual promenade deck you can walk all the way around, which almost no modern ship has any more.

The kids clubs exist and are perfectly decent, with age bands and real staff, but they are not the centre of the ship and the numbers can be thin outside peak weeks. Ask about expected child counts on your specific sailing. Any good advisor can find that out.

Cabins are a reasonable size and the bathrooms are better than the mainstream average, which after a week matters more than you would think.

The food

Better than mainstream and not as good as the food-led lines. The main dining room is genuinely pleasant, the service is attentive and unhurried, and there is a serious effort made with regional menus on themed itineraries.

The speciality restaurants cost extra and the steakhouse is worth doing once. The buffet is calm, which sounds like faint praise until you have queued at a buffet on a ship with five thousand people.

What I would watch out for

The pace is slow. That is the product. If your family measures a holiday by how much happened, this will feel like very little happened.

Some of the fleet is older. The refurbishments are good but a refurbished older ship is still an older ship.

And the onboard age profile is real. If your teenager is expecting to find a crowd of other teenagers, on many sailings they will not.

Who I would book on it

Multigenerational trips where grandparents are paying attention to comfort and the grandchildren are old enough to entertain themselves. Alaska. Long scenic itineraries. Anyone who wants a ship that feels like a ship rather than a shopping centre.

And parents who are exhausted and would quite like a holiday where the loudest thing on board is a cello.

Questions people actually ask