Reviews

We have traveled often in Holland on Boat and Bike tours. This was as wonderful as all, with good itineraries. It was self guided but with help if needed. Lovely. Food and cabins good and the crew friendly and very conscientious about distancing and Covid regulators. Bravo for hard work and a great experience!

Excellent road maps for biking the Hansa highligt trip. COVID-proof and GO FIT-proof.

Just back from the Hansa Highlights Tour on De Nassau . Thoroughly enjoyed it. The cabin was small but comfortable with a compact but more than adequate en suite. Food was excellent and the staff were helpful and friendly. Because my wife has a disability we took our own tandem but the crew were more than happy to accommodate this. The routes were well planned, scenic and managed by José on this semi guided trip. Highly recommended and looking forward to repeating the experience. Thank You Boat Bike Tours for a memorable holiday!

The boat was broke and we had no air conditioning in order to sleep well it did not cool off at nite the first couple of nites. They ran out of the wine I liked.

Beautiful clean rooms. Boat experience, food, bike and staff were excellent – ***. Biking information, nightly reviews, maps and app were very good guidance for our daily excursions thru the villages and towns of the Netherlands. Great experience.

Excellent family trip.

We travelled with Boat & Bike this year, doing the Hansa route, beginning and ending in Amsterdam. Was our first time cycling in The Netherlands, and we thoroughly enjoyed the countryside. If you’re a fair-weather cyclist like us, don’t be fooled by the flat landscape. The winds can be really strong, and arrive from nowhere. If we did it again, we would definitely go e-bike! Our tour guide was BRILLIANT (thank you, Paulette), and the crew of the MS Nassau really hardworking, and friendly. The food was quite exceptional! So why an ‘average’ rating? The website shows the ship having been recently refurbished, but not all of the cabins have. Ours was not, and we were at the stern end of the ship, trying to sleep with the noise and fumes from a generator, as only two of the seven overnight stops had on-shore power hookups. I slept hardly at all in 207, until we were moved for the last three nights. I noticed that some members of the crew had better cabins, and I felt that this should not have been the case. We’ve come away with some good and happy memories, but feel VERY STRONGLY that, if you know you need to generate power overnight AT ALL, that paying guests, on holiday, should not be placed in adjacent cabins. We’d go back to The Netherlands in a hearbeat, though, and this tour is a brilliant way of seeing the beautiful Hansa towns.

“Nicely refurbished boat with a few teething problems that need sorting out. The styling of the ship is fresh and contemporary and the staff are all very friendly and extremely helpful at all times. I thank them for making our stay so good. The cycling was so enjoyable. Good clear instructions and we used the GPS app which really made it relaxing. Lovely countryside and towns to visit along the way. We cycled 50+ km each day which was easy for us as we paid extra for the very nice electric bikes. You can vary the assistance to your peddling so you can get a decent amount of exercise without getting exhausted after 6 days cycling. The bikes were brand new and in great condition. The staff were helpful if there were any adjustments needed. Unfortunately the saddles were the basic hard ones and after 6 days, even with padded shorts and my own padded saddle cover it was very uncomfortable. I really wanted to give 5 stars on my review but there were a few things that really need to be sorted to allow me to do so: Our premium double cabin had a bed which was raised too high even for someone who is 5’8″”. The front edge of the bed had a wooden edge which was extremely uncomfortable to climb over. Needs a step or the wooden edge to be removed. However the mattress was very comfy and we slept really well. The shower tray was very shallow and the curtain didn’t keep the water in. The whole bathroom was really flooded every time we washed. Very dangerous and slippery. In addition the proximity of the basin to the toilet meant that it was an uncomfortable squeeze to get to. The windows were difficult to shut due to the plastic part in the frame being loose and difficult to clip the window into. There was often a smell of sewage in the corridor on the lower deck. Thankfully the rooms did not smell! The electrics needed attention. Our ceiling lights failed and the cabin air conditioning was intermittent. In the main salon the wall lights randomly flickered bright and dim which drove me crazy! Finally the food was not of the best quality. The breakfast was almost the same every day. It was missing good coffee (you had to pay for proper coffee at the bar) and bacon and pastries – the sort of indulgences you enjoy on holiday but don’t have at home! Dinner three course meal was uninspiring. The daily soup was EXTREMELY salty as was a lot of the food. The soup seems to just taste of salty stock and only changed colour each day but not flavour. The salad course was very bland and insufficient. One table spoon per person at most. Some of the main courses were tasty but the desserts were like school food. The live entertainment provided one night was not needed or required. It just made the ship very noisy and only a couple of people stayed to listen. Jose who was our cycle guide obviously cared deeply that everyone was looked after and enjoyed their trip. A really lovely lady who briefed us each evening as to the route for the following day. The only thing that might have made the briefing better was to have a few more photos of the recommended places to stop along the way so you could get more of an idea of where you might like to have your lunch. One finally thing: Almost all the guest were at or over retirement age and there were only 6 English speakers, the rest were German. We were a family with two teen children and felt out of place. On arrival we were allocated a table for the dining room with two Spanish speakers and were expected to stay at the same table every meal time. As only one of the Spanish guest could speak English it make meal times awkward. Would have been better to be at a table of just 4 or to have been able to mingle with other guests each evening. In summary, the cycling trip is really enjoyable the boat and cycles are of a good quality but there are a number of things which could easily be addressed to make it really worth 5 stars.”

Thank you to a wonderful staff.

The Hanseatic Tour The renovation of the De Nassau was not complete as evidenced by the non-working air conditioning in our cabin; the flickering lights in the salon during meals; and the toilet paper fixture falling off the wall. The hotel manager promised to have the air conditioning fixed on three occasions and it never happened. The tour seems organized for German tourists — the food was obviously geared toward their tastes and only minimally toward the area we were touring in (The Netherlands); and the nightly briefing by the tour guide was 45 minutes of German and 15 minutes of English. The amount of information about the area we were about to ride through was minimal. We also missed out on preparation emails regarding the GPS app that we were supposed to download. We were surprised to find the exact same breakfast and lunch every day of the trip. The selection was surprising not Dutch in the selection of cheese, etc. Our last trip (with Eurosail) was much more geared to the area we were in and there was much greater variety. Lastly the ship’s crew although very hard working and polite was understaffed. Dinner took over 2 hours each night which left little time for town walks. The bikes were not thoroughly prepped before the start. Some tires were low, and this was not addressed unless the rider requested it. The routes were lovely, the GPS app great and the itinerary seemed well planned.

We were disappointed in the unfinished quality of the room. I was injured by a toilet paper holder that fell off the wall and was only fixed when I found a carpenter working in the hall and asked him to fix it, after having mentioned it twice to the purser. The cabin air conditioning did not work we also told them about this. The lights in the salon were flickering constantly due to bad power at each meal. There was little information provided about the different sights and locales. We were hoping to be provided with much more support in that area. Instructions were vague for tours about each area. Perhaps there was more provided to the german guests, but the english speaking guests were left in the dark. The bikes were in great condition and Robb was fantastic at making sure all was in working order. Food service was very accommodating for dietary differences, although there was little variety in breakfast and lunch choices.

100% for staff on the boat. Cooking included. Only one star less for the booking side. A bit confusing!!!!