Maidencall MV Rotterdam

22 October 2021

On October 14 the new flagship of the Holland America Line made her maidencall to the city of Rotterdam.  The impressive cruisevessel MV Rotterdam, delivered by the shipyard in July 2021, is the seventh ship with that same name.

The maidencall of a new mv Rotterdam at the hometown of Rotterdam is always a special event, and in this case even more so. It is one of the first cruise ships to call at Rotterdam since the corona crisis hit the cruise sector midships. The downturn was disastrous: in 2020, global cruise shipping carried 'only' 6 million passengers, compared to 30 million in 2019. Now, a year and a half (and billions in losses in the entire cruise sector) later, the big cruise operators are slowly picking up the pace.

The relation between Rotterdam and the Holland America Line goes back 150 years, when local entrepreneurs set up a transatlantic liner shipping company.

Since 1871, millions of Europeans have used the HAL to travel to New York, many of them immigrants looking for a better life in the US. From 1989 onwards, HAL has come under American ownership, but keeping in line with its roots, all the HAL ships proudly fly the Dutch flag.