Impressions of Holland-America

Overall I give Holland good marks as a cruising experience. It was everything you would expect on a middle quality cruise line. (same as Princess)  Now, admittedly, we can only compare to Princess and I’ll try to be fair in my comparison.  You can see our balcony stateroom on the left.  They do some nice things like having the current day of the week on every elevator mat as you can see on the right.

But I’ve highlighted a few detailed items below.   If you are not interested in a commentary like this, feel free to stop reading. 

The dining room service and food was very good. I did miss the everyday menu items (e.g. Fettuccini Alfredo)  on Princess when the main entrees do not appeal.  But there was only 1 dinner where that happened for me and I did find an entree for that meal.  My one complaint is the hours on the buffet.  On most days it was closed between 10:30 and 11:30 am as well as from 8:00 pm until 10:30 pm.  This is quite a change from Princess where the buffet is open between 6am and 10 pm and the International Cafe is open all night.  Admittedly this put a dent in our nightly chocolate chip cookie run, but we adapted. LOL

We had anytime dining.  They have 2 dining rooms on this ship, one for anytime and one for fixed seating.  I thought I had reserved a table for 2 at 5pm using the Navigator app before the cruise, but when I checked on day 1, they could not find it so I made the reservation.  As long we we arrived by 5:15, we would get our table for 2.  We did get the same table and wait staff each night which was very good.  In general, dining in the Princess app is a bit better. as it offers more options.  We had one premium restaurant night included in our package and we enjoyed the Pinnacle Grill very much.

Speaking of the Navigator app, it's a pretty good app.  You must to use it for all excursion tickets (no paper tickets available).  It takes a while to get used to it, but once you learn a few things, it works OK. You can view all ship activities using it and add some to My Itinerary which was nice.  You can also view your billing statement and other common activities.  

The internet is quite different.   No staffed internet cafeteria to help users.  I had no issues with the login process as the steps are well documented. The basic internet package only lets you get to common webmail and social media sites.  To view any other sites you need to upgrade to Premium (only cost $40 each for our 7 day cruise since we had the 1 device basic plan as a part of our package). It uses Starlink and I found performance to be pretty good.  I just ran an internet speed test and got 30 Mbps down and 2 up. Quite acceptable for a cruise ship.

The evening entertainment shows are quite different from Princess.  While Princess employs their own singers and dancers to put on a number of Production shows, I suspect Holland contracts with people for this service.  We had a 6 person dance company on our cruise.  We did enjoy the music a lot on this cruise as they had a pair of piano players who we listened to most nights. We had heard that most Holland ships have very good music programs.   We have not attended various bar performers on Princess, but did enjoy hearing the Princess band, pianists, or other classical performers in the Atrium area during the day.  Speaking of the atrium, that is the center of activity on a Princess ship, but on this one, it was hardly used.  

They had a very good presentation about the behind the scenes activities it takes to run a ship like this called "City on the Sea".  It was a very informative presentation about everything from electricity generation, to food prep, water and waste management, and internet.  It was very lively and entertaining and Mary and I enjoyed it a lot.  At the end, they had nearly the entire crew come out on stage!  If you take a Holland cruise, I highly recommend seeing this presentation.

In summary, we enjoyed our cruise and will consider Holland-America again if it offers an itinerary we would like to take.   We do like the size of their ships (1500 -2200 passengers) as opposed to Princess ships running from 2800 to 4300 people unless you can get on the Island or the Coral.   So we shall see what cruises we pick.

Tomorrow we leave the ship around 8:15 am to head to the airport for our direct flight home.   Hopefully nothing happens that triggers another blog post!   Our next scheduled trip is a road trip to upstate New York in October.