Holland America is basing Nieuw Statendam at Dover for the whole of 2028.
The season opens on New Year’s Day and runs into November, with eighteen sailings of fourteen nights or more leaving Kent, plus twenty-eight-day combinations that pair them up.
Fares are in sterling on the line’s UK site, per person, two sharing.
The ship
Nieuw Statendam is the middle of Holland America’s three Pinnacle-class ships, built by Fincantieri at Marghera and launched in 2018. She was last refurbished in 2023, so she comes to Dover nine years old with a five-year-old refit behind her.
At 99,902 gross tons she is the largest class the line operates, carrying 2,666 guests in 1,339 staterooms with a crew of around 1,025. That is roughly 37 tons of ship per passenger, generous by mainstream standards, and part of why these ships feel calmer than their size suggests.
Cabins run from inside through ocean view and verandah to four tiers of suite, and there are solo staterooms, which is rarer than it should be on a ship this size.
The design signature is Music Walk, a cluster of live music rooms including B.B. King’s Blues Club and Billboard Onboard, alongside the World Stage theatre and its wraparound LED screen. Dining beyond the main room takes in Pinnacle Grill, Tamarind, Canaletto and Rudi’s Sel de Mer, with Club Orange for suite guests and Club Orange members, a Greenhouse Spa, and wine-blending sessions at Blend.
Her interiors are by Adam Tihany and Bjørn Storbraaten, and she carries work by more than 150 artists, which sounds like marketing until you are aboard and keep stopping to look at things.
She is not a ship for waterslides and a ropes course. She is a mid-sized premium ship with a lot of live music, and that is the trade.
Where she goes
Winter is the Canaries, with Morocco, Portugal and Spain attached. Spring and summer bring Wild British Isles round trips, Norwegian fjords, and Arctic Circle crossings to North Cape and Icelandic waters.
Autumn turns back to the Baltic and Scandinavian capitals, including a fortnight built around Berlin’s Oktoberfest, before the Canaries return with Northern Lights sailings alongside them.
The dated sailings
The year starts on 1 January 2028 with a fifteen-night Canary Island Enchantment with Morocco and Spain, Dover to Barcelona, from £1,599 inside. That works out at £107 a night, the cheapest per-night fare of the Dover season.
31 March carries two departures. A fourteen-night Canary Island Enchantment with Morocco and Portugal, round trip, from £2,144. And the twenty-eight-night Canary Islands and Scandinavian Capitals with Stockholm, from £3,904, which is that fortnight plus its follow-on.
28 May brings the fourteen-night Wild British Isles: Scotland, England and Ireland, round trip Dover, from £2,219. At £159 a night it is the dearest of the dated sailings, which is late May doing its work.
29 September has a fourteen-night Canary Island Enchantment with Portugal from £1,949, or £139 a night.
Dover undercuts Rotterdam
Nieuw Statendam sells the same itineraries from both ports, and Dover is consistently the cheaper of the two.
| Sailing | Dover | Rotterdam |
|---|---|---|
| 14-night Canaries with Morocco & Portugal | £2,144 | £2,184 |
| 14-night Wild British Isles | £2,219 | £2,259 |
| 14-night Scandinavian Capitals | £2,024 | £2,099 |
| 28-night Canaries & Scandinavian Capitals | £3,904 | £4,044 |
Between £40 and £140 a head, before you count what it costs to reach the Netherlands.
The back-to-back saving is real, but only downstairs
Booking the twenty-eight-night as one voyage rather than two fortnights saves £384 a head in an inside cabin, and the same in an ocean view.
Go up the ship and it thins out fast. A verandah saves £74. A Signature Suite saves £34 on a booking of ten thousand pounds.
In a Neptune Suite the combined voyage costs £56 more than booking the two fortnights separately.
So the discount is worth having at the bottom of the ship and worth checking carefully anywhere above it. That comparison assumes the second fortnight prices like the first, since its own fare is not published separately.
The rest of the fleet
Four other ships work Europe in 2028. Rotterdam sails from Rotterdam, Zuiderdam from Amsterdam after her Evolution rebuild, with fjord weeks from £894. Volendam runs the Legendary Voyage of the Vikings to Boston.
Nieuw Amsterdam returns to Europe for the first time in more than a decade, bringing Morimoto by Sea, the line’s only Masaharu Morimoto restaurant at sea.
Sailings run from January to early December across the region, which makes 2028 the line’s first genuinely year-round European year.
The bottom line
A ship at Dover from New Year’s Day to November is the most substantial UK-departure programme Holland America has offered in years, and the fares undercut the Dutch alternative on identical cruises.
The January Canaries sailing at £107 a night is the sharpest number in the season, and a verandah on it costs £151 a night, which on a winter crossing with sea days in it is the upgrade worth pricing.
Book with the Have It All package and the Early Booking Bonus adds prepaid crew appreciation, which is the daily service charge covered rather than onboard credit to spend on board. No end date has been published for it.
