This was our fourth cruise on European waterways with AmaWaterways and, pleased to say, it (again) lived up to our expectations.
Readers can see my earlier review of our cruise onboard AmaKristina in August 2017, which has a lot of detail to give a sense of the amount of work and planning AMA to into for the day-by-day excursions, so I’ll keep this one much more brief.
Since that first Rhine cruise – Amsterdam to Basel, Switzerland – we’ve also done a Danube cruise onboard AmaSerena; the Christmas Markets (Basel-Amsterdam) onboard AmaLucia; and now this ‘Holland and Belgium Waterways/Bulb fields’ cruise onboard AmaCerto. The ships are all very well appointed and the service and attention to detail has retained the quality we received on our first and subsequent cruises.
It’s often the case the photographs of e.g. hotels, taken when everything is ‘brand new’, don’t reflect what you actually receive when you arrive – but that’s not the case with the AMA ships we’ve been on where their ‘staterooms’, meals, service, and attention to detail – give a feel that you’re the first folk to use this particular floating ‘hotel’.
On these European river cruises you do, indeed, see a number of other cruise lines, with vessels all being very similar in appearance, so it’s easy to be tempted to try something different. On every cruise we’ve been on, someone will say either “we did try [think of a company name] but they didn’t come up to the AMA standard so we’re back here”; or “we did price others but thought, none of them are cheap so why take a chance when you know what you’ll get with AMA”.
This particular cruise started in Amsterdam. We visited Hoorn, Bruinisse, Ghent, Antwerp, Rotterdam (with an optional visit to the KInderdijk Windmills), and back to Amsterdam. Visit choices typically offered local city walking tours, city/countryside bike tours, bulbfield tours/experience, Belgian chocolate workshop, special interest tours, and culminating in a visit to the Keukenhof Gardens. Something to choose from every day, in every location. Note that the daily itinerary for each cruise is available to view on https://www.amawaterways.co.uk/
A few photos attached to give a feel for the varying architecture, from old to modern, plus one showing some of the Kinderdijk Windmills (where we also got a demonstration of a working windmill).
Flights and complimentary transfers all went smoothly (as before) with very good quality vehicles being used for those transfers, getting the visit off to another good start, and ending the same way.
Health permitting, this won’t be our last cruise with AMA Waterways!
