Day 65 At Sea

Today was a little better than yesterday….  It is slowly getting warmer and the seas slightly improving.    I spent the day visiting with friends and thinking of warmer days. Tomorrow may be the breakthrough…  Warmer days coming soon…  Tonight we had dinner in the Pinnacle Grill celebrating our friend Ton’s birthday.  The meal was just perfect!  It was a wonderful evening with great friends.  My frustration with the internet continues to grow…..  Why?  Because the last 30 years there has been explosion of Internet technologies.  The services and platforms provided have increased dramatically and the costs have plummeted. Unfortunately, this has not translated in improved services and lower pricing on Holland America Line.  Come to think of it, I believe their pricing has remained at the same lofty level for years in the face of dramatic drops in Internet pricing around the world.  As more and more people bring iPhones, iPads, PDAs and laptops on board, the cruise line has not responded well to the increasing demand.   When people embark on a long voyage around the world they particularly feel the pain.  Our lives are totally connected, socially, financially and to provide informational needs through the medium of the internet.  Only a small fraction on the 400 subscribers onboard (not including crew) can actually get on the Internet at the same time to use the services they contracted for with Holland America Line.  Just today I had a message that there were too many subscribers online and to try later.  I went to the Internet Manager and inquired as to how many users were online.  And the answer was….  Only 22!   The really sad thing in all of this is that the business model they have essentially says that the worse they perform, the more money they make.  Sad indeed!  This is because the cost to the user is based on time logged on the system, so if the system is really slow or not transmitting data it takes much longer than it should normally, Holland America Line makes more and more money.  They should use the same model for some of the staff, for example, the poorer the fuel consumption performance of the Captain, the more money he should be paid or the less revenue that the Hotel Manager brings in should translate to a higher salary and bonuses.  In addition, the view among some of the technical staff on board is that as long as you got a connection and started the meter reading, regardless of the performance even if you cannot get any data transmitted, they have done their job and the service is working properly.  That is so wrong words cannot describe.  This has created a huge swell of dissatisfaction among the guests onboard since day one.  I have been communicating with management on board, encouraging them to respond to the problem and their efforts to respond have been noted, but to date the actual performance remains intermittent, slow or non-existent. It is time for Holland America Line to step up and resolve this problem.  The technology is far too good to continue to provide a such poor service and, I believe Holland America Line is better than this.