Anthem of the Seas - Hawaii from Vancouver

Law and the calendar shape this one. It is the first leg of the ship's move from its Seattle Alaska season to Australia - the catalog's next Anthem sailing picks up in Honolulu bound for Sydney - and cabotage law bars a foreign-flagged ship from carrying passengers one way from Seattle to Honolulu, which is why the voyage boards in Vancouver and Seattle is a port call on day two before five straight sea days across the Pacific. Seven of the twelve nights are at sea. The island section is short: a tender day at Kona, where the port notes warn that surf cancels calls; a sea day; a scenic run along the Napali Coast with no landing; then Honolulu on day eleven, one more sea day, and disembarkation at Honolulu on day thirteen. The arithmetic is three island days, one of them seen from the deck, and a return flight to arrange. The fare is the lowest in the catalog's Hawaii set - Celebrity Edge does the same Vancouver-to-Honolulu crossing in ten nights at close to double, and the fifteen-to-eighteen-night Hawaii sailings from West Coast ports on Koningsdam, Nieuw Amsterdam, Ruby Princess and Discovery Princess all cost more and take longer.

The threads treat it as a value play with a weather caveat. A November 2024 poster pricing a balcony on the Anthem crossing for a family with a five- and a three-year-old asked whether the fare was too good to be true; the top reply said repositioning cruises are exactly this kind of deal and to take it, and a second, from someone who had done the Hawaii return, said the five sea days each way were the relaxing part and that children old enough for the kids' club make it work. The dissent came from a poster who would rather spend two weeks on the islands than five days at sea, and from someone who had done the Vancouver-to-Hawaii crossing on Celebrity in late September, reporting rough water and cold temperatures leaving Vancouver and through the next four sea days, with six in a row a little much. This sailing is also a September departure, so that account is the closest thing in the archive to a forecast. An August 2025 thread asking whether anyone had done the Hawaii-and-Seattle run recently drew only ship-general replies, one of them from a solo cruiser worried about being bored on the sea days; a photo posted from an Anthem balcony near Hawaii in October 2025 caught an offshore lightning storm. On the long-crossing threads two separate posters said not to book an inside cabin for a voyage of this length.

It suits people for whom the crossing is the holiday - the sea-day program is the ship page's subject - and who plan to stay on in Hawaii before flying home. It does not suit anyone island-first: the route threads point those travellers at NCL's American-flagged Pride of America inter-island loop or at simply flying, and the 2019 review of that loop reads like a different holiday from this one. Nor is it the pick for cruisers wanting more days at sea, since Koningsdam's longer Hawaii loop drew a warning from a 2023 poster who had sailed that ship twice that Holland America's daytime program is thin over a run with thirteen sea days.