Over the past 30 years, I’ve been on more than 20 cruises. So many I’ve certainly lost count, but we’ve tried nearly all the lines, and they all have their pluses and minuses.
- If it’s all about superb dining and great service, you want Oceania.
- If you want everything to truly be included, regardless of price, you want Regent.
- If you want a great kids’ experience, Royal Caribbean is really the way to go.
- Unless you’re addicted to Disney, in which case that’s the obvious choice.
- For cruise tours in Alaska, you can’t beat Princess, since they own the railroad.
- Tauck has the best river boats.
- Crystal had large suites.
- NCL had espresso machines in their suites.
- Costa is great if you like to be insulted by Italian waiters.
In all those years, we’d never been on Holland America and we’d always heard good things about it. We often pick our cruise line based upon the itinerary, and being able to sail from Fort Lauderdale to our second home in Vancouver, BC, sold us on giving the Holland America Koningsdam a try.
Let me preface this by saying this was not a cheap cruise. 22 days and $22,000 for a suite that wasn’t even a top-tier suite is not cheap. But we’ve spent that kind of money before on high-end cruises. We bought the “Have It All” package, so we assumed it would be a pretty frictionless experience.
Frictionless, it was not.
In all fairness, apparently the ship had spent two weeks in dry dock, and everything certainly was gleaming new on board, but it appears that they had forgotten how to operate a cruise line in the process.
Our experience started when we arrived at the appointed time at the Fort Lauderdale Cruise Terminal to find a quarter mile long line of people waiting in the hot sun to get on board. Ninety minutes later, we had still not quite entered the building and were seriously concerned that some of the elderly people in line were not going to survive in order to board the ship.
Later, this was blamed on a “Technology problem” But the only technology we saw in the building was:
- the usual metal detector
- the TSA people doing whatever it is they do with their passport scanner
- some guy with a hand scanner scanning the cruise tickets in your phone.
Things seemed to be working just fine, and the surviving passengers were moving pretty quickly, desperate to get on board. Given that the line had not gotten any shorter, I have no idea how they actually managed to sail on time, but they did.
Understandably, passengers were not in a terrific mood for the first evening, but curiously, the previous Holland America passengers seemed to take this in stride, so perhaps it is the norm. We consistently found that about half the passengers we talked to had never been on any other cruise line and were perfectly happy. That was not the case with passengers who had actually experienced efficiency elsewhere.
Let me establish that there was no problem with any of the personnel on board the ship, as has been our experience on all cruise lines (except Costa) everyone was friendly and helpful and devoted to making sure passengers had a great time despite all of the obstacles that corporate management was throwing in their way.
What sort of obstacles, you ask?
As previously stated, we purchased the “Have It All” package, because we were told it included shore excursions, premium dining, a drinks package, internet, and crew gratuities. Some of these are naturally limited, and some of them are limited only by bait and switch tactics, which are common everywhere aboard the ship.
The gratuities are not consistently included in this package, so our travel agent erroneously had told us they were. No problem, what’s another $800?
The shore excursions are not “all” included; instead, there’s a credit. In 22 days, we only went on five shore excursions, yet somehow the credit only paid for about half of them. Ok, I can understand that. Only the very top-end cruise lines include all the shore excursions.
And certainly one expects premium dining to be somewhat limited. Here, the limitation is exactly three meals. Three meals in 22 days. Plus, when dining in, say, the steak house, if you want the very best steaks, that’s extra, even in addition to the “have it all.” Okay, that’s stingy, but still not a showstopper.
That brings us to the second most irritating corporate policy on this ship, which is the drinks package. I’m sure you’ve encountered cruise lines that sell a drinks package that includes soft drinks and another drinks package that includes alcohol. The way they work is that if you have one of those packages, you show them your card and they bring you the drinks that are included in your package. It seems straightforward.
Holland America has found a way to make it not be straightforward.
Every single order involved a card transaction. Two of you, each one of you, must produce a card, not entirely unreasonable, assuming there are a lot of deadbeats on board who try to share a drinks package. Why do you have to then sign for a drink included in your package?
Oh, and then you discover that the drinks package doesn’t actually include it “all.” It only includes drinks up to $12. Magically, about half of the drinks available on board are $13 or $14. So you’ll end up paying an extra dollar or two plus an 18% service charge, even though you supposedly “have it all.”
But the number one irritant on board is the internet access. I can remember cruising before there was internet, but that was a long time ago. I can remember cruising when there was lousy internet, but that was also a long time ago. I can remember cruising when Wi-Fi was spotty, but now it cannot be spotty because you are pretty much dependent upon your phone if you want to accomplish anything on this cruise. Fortunately, you can connect your phone to the Wi-Fi without having an internet package, so at least that’s one bit of corporate sanity.
But here’s the real problem: Even though your Have It All package includes internet access, it is for only one device. Every time you go to log in, if you are switching between your laptop and your phone, you will have to log out of one of them in order to log into the other one. Clearly, this is annoying, but think about this further. What if you’re trying to log into a website on your laptop that requires two-factor authentication? You’re pretty much screwed. It might be possible to do a dance where your phone is somehow connected to the same Wi-Fi as your computer, but your phone is not logged into their internet, but your computer is logged into the internet, and two-factor authentication might work. Might.
Of course, every time that you log into the internet, you are offered the opportunity to upgrade for a mere $5 a day. It’s never actually made clear whether this upgrade is to enable streaming or whether it actually allows you to use more than one device at a time. If it does allow you to use more than one device at a time, then you’d be better off not getting the have it all package and instead just getting the upgraded internet package for one person and sharing it.
So perhaps for another $200 per person, I could have upgraded my wife and me to “have more than it all” As far as internet, but at this point I was getting pretty annoyed. Plus I’m pretty sure that even if streaming worked, it wouldn’t solve the other problem, which is that they have blocked other important services such as:
- Your ability to access the app store to keep your apps up to date.
- Your phone’s ability to back itself up to iCloud
- and even Dropbox.
If you have important files in the cloud, I assure you, you do not “have them all.”
As I’ve mentioned, service on board the ship was excellent. Even in areas such as the dining room, where it is hampered by corporate policies, the servers were unfailingly nice and did their best. But where other cruise lines have a sommelier, this one has the waiter taking your card off to process your drink order and then other people randomly bringing those drinks from different directions at different times. There’s no continuity of service possible with this DoorDash approach to table service.
The food in the Pinnacle Steakhouse and the strangely misnamed Rudi’s Sel de Mer (which is actually mostly a French restaurant) was quite good. The food in the dining room was quite …variable. Certain dishes, like the prime rib, were consistently excellent, and there was an impressive pea soup served one night. On the other hand, no fish ever arrived resembling anything fish-like in flavor or texture.
Spent a lot of time in the upstairs space called Tamarind, which is confusing enough that most guests probably never found it. It has the only intimate bar on the entire ship, but it’s not visible from the entry, so you have to stumble upon it.
The restaurant itself serves… well, it’s kind of hard to describe. It’s sort of a mixture of Indonesian fare and some sushi, but then there’s another section to the restaurant, which is called Morimoto Sushi at Sea, which serves sushi (at sea) that is absolutely excellent. In fact, one dish is identical to the one served at Morimoto in New York City, so kudos to the sushi chefs. But then they also have a special Morimoto dinner once per cruise that takes over the restaurant and seems to serve a combination of the normal Indonesian restaurant food and the Morimoto sushi. I’m not sure what that dinner is really all about, even though we ate it. But the atmosphere and service here was very good, and we visited quite a few times. Getting actually great sushi at sea was impressive.
For entertainment, the Koningsdam has made the same layout error that Disney made with their first ship. All of the entertainment is grouped in one area of the ship on two connected floors. This means it’s impossible to find an intimate space like a piano bar because everything is open to the hallways. A loud band in one space is going to bleed into the other spaces.
There’s also a theater in the pointy end of the ship. It’s nicely designed, with almost no pillars blocking the view, but it has a tiny stage and no backstage area, so it’s impossible to put on a production show. It’s mostly comprised of single acts and duos doing comedy, singing, or dance.
Shore excursions also meet in this theater space. On most ships, you go to the theater at the meeting time, sign in, sit down, and wait for your shore excursion to be called. That’s a general description of the process here, but it omits the fact that you will stand in line for half an hour in a group of people stretching nearly to the other end of the ship, waiting to get into the theater. Why this is so is not clear to me. The entries to the theater are very narrow, and there’s someone trying to sell you water to take on shore before you can even enter the theater. Still, I don’t understand how it can possibly be so slow to process the people waiting for shore excursions. It means that you need to arrive a half an hour before your meeting time, which is a full hour before your tour departs. This was not a one-time event or technology problem. It’s just… idiocy.
Cruising is all about going and relaxing, visiting exotic places and not having to worry about the hassles of packing and unpacking. Cruisers are looking for a frictionless experience. Somehow Holland America has managed to maximize friction at every step of the process. On a list of recommended cruise lines, I would have to put it… well, not at the bottom. There’s always Costa.