Prawn cocktail, cream of tomato soup and a Grand Marnier soufflé. Holland America is putting the jet age back on the menu.
The line has revealed what happens on board its Pan Am 100th Anniversary Legendary Voyage, a 28-night round trip from Miami on Zuiderdam leaving on 30 October 2027.
The date is no accident. Pan Am’s first scheduled flight, a mail run from Key West to Havana, took off on 28 October 1927. The ship sails two days after the centenary.
Five people who knew Pan Am
The speakers lean heavily on people who were actually there.
Linda Freire chairs the Pan Am Museum Foundation and spent her career at the airline as a flight attendant, recruiter and manager. Her vice chairman, David Hinson, trained Pan Am’s cabin crew.
David Kliman flew Pan Am for decades as a frequent passenger, logged more than four million airline miles, and is bringing stories from his memorabilia collection.
Steve Gray, a storyteller from an aviation family, covers the Flying Clippers and the airline’s routes through South America.
And Willie Aames, best known for the American sitcoms Eight is Enough and Charles in Charge, will talk about Pan Am’s pioneering years and the wartime Pacific Clipper flight.
A Clipper Club at sea
Pan Am’s Clipper Club was its network of private airport lounges, the place premium passengers waited, ate and drank before a flight.
Holland America is promising moments inspired by it around the ship. It hasn’t yet said whether that means a dedicated venue or a series of events.
Paul Grigsby, the line’s vice president of itinerary planning and a former Pan Am employee, said the airline turned travel into “an experience filled with discovery, connection and a sense of occasion.”
Dinner at 30,000 feet, served at sea level
The special menus are built on dishes once served on Pan Am flights.
Cocktail de crevettes comes with boiled egg, asparagus and Louis dressing. Filet mignon arrives maître d’hôtel style with croquette potatoes, and there’s even Dover sole, baked in puff pastry with a crab filling.
The bar gets two period pieces. The Pan Am Cocktail mixes white rum, Campari, orgeat, lemon and egg white.
The Clipper Cocktail, which was served aboard the flying boats themselves, is Mount Gay Eclipse rum, Dolin Blanc vermouth and grenadine.
Tours that follow the flying boats
Four shore excursions have been built specifically for this sailing.
In Cartagena, guests tour the city in classic roadsters and learn how its emerald trade drew the jet set. In Colón, the tour pairs the Agua Clara locks with the Panama Canal Railway.
On Antigua, the trip climbs to Shirley Heights, the vantage point Holland America says Pan Am navigators used to guide aircraft into the harbour.
In Trinidad, the tour visits Chaguaramas, which the line describes as the airline’s former flying boat base, and its military history and aerospace museum.
Across 18 ports, nine were on Pan Am’s original network, including Nassau, San Juan, Willemstad and Port of Spain. It is the kind of long Caribbean voyage that suits British cruisers.
One gap will stand out to aviation buffs: Havana, where Pan Am began, is not on the itinerary. There are no Cuban calls at all.
The ship you’ll actually sail
Zuiderdam does not emerge from her Evolution rebuild until 2 April 2028.
That means this voyage sails on the ship as she is now. The new solo verandah cabins, Bridgeview Suites and Grand Dutch Café all arrive after it ends.
Holland America’s UK site has it from £3,199 per person for an inside cabin, cruise-only. That works out at about £114 a night across 28 nights.
Taxes, fees and port expenses are included up to £452 a head. Flights to Miami are extra.
The bottom line
For aviation buffs, this is a genuinely unusual month at sea. People who worked for Pan Am will tell its story on the routes it flew.
For everyone else, it is a long, port-heavy Caribbean cruise on a 2002 ship in her last season before a rebuild, with a theme laid over the top.
Which of those you’re buying is your call. Price it as the second, and decide whether the first is worth the difference.
