awesomefat

I did want to report back now that this cruise is over. Service did drastically improve, and they did finally get the wine sorted out. It is frustrating that it took half the cruise to accomplish this, but if I were to measure everything by the last 7 days, I’d give Princess pretty solid marks. Not perfect, but not complaint worthy. In any case, figured I’d report back with a final update.

Come and say hi if you see me… I’m the giant white dude who always is wearing Hawaiian shirts. Think Andre the giant, just better looking 🙂

We were on the sky princess last year, admittedly, still not back to full capacity, and I agree the app was amazing. I was summoning drinks to myself from all over the ship with the near 100% success and delivery time in the 5 to 10 minute range. We were also on the diamond princess in January and it worked much much better than it is working here on the island princess. I wish I could say I only try to use it twice a day lol, it is more like twice an hour 🙂. Perhaps that indicates a different problem, but I can confidently say I really test the system hehehe.

Compassion and understanding is fine for the workers, but the cruise line itself was still quite happy to charge me a lot of money for a lot of promised undelivered perks. They are not a charity. I understand that this is not an individual worker’s fault and they are all likely overworked and under appreciated, but at some level the business should be held accountable. If they are going to sell me something they can’t deliver, their practices need to change, and that is the point of posts like this. Presumably we are all cruisers who rely on forums like this to determine where to spend our next cruise dollar.

How many points in the casino make me “important” in the eyes of the manager? I have not noticed an improvement and I’m over 2500 points so far on this cruise and it’s day 3 of 15. Feels like I have spent plenty to be worth good drink service, but maybe I’m deluding myself lol. Thoughts?

So I just came into the casino and waived the casino manager over. He said he would get me a waiter. About 10 minutes later he came back and said the bar was backed up and it might be awhile. The pit boss then came over and told me that there were only 2 servers on this level of the ship and they are understaffed. I understand this as a reason, but how am I supposed to react to that?

Let me ask another question… how often should I see a server in the casino to take a drink order? If I am there for 3 hours, I probably see the server 3 times. I see the casino manager or Pitt boss stroll by every 5 minutes. I have been using them to get a server for me. This is the island princess where the casino is very tiny. If they want me playing in the casino, I should be able to use the app and get a drink in less than 10 minutes, or order with a server conveniently. That just is not the case on this sailing and I don’t want to leave my lucky machine (lol) and risk someone else taking it just to go to a bar and place an order. That being said, every bar I have gone up to so far has had quick service. So this does not seem to be an issue with the bars being too busy. I really do dislike being difficult and I do realize these are first world problems. My main concern here is that princess is selling a service and not delivering it. If they can’t maintain the staff to serve or the product to dispense, don’t upsell people on these things.

Very good point about getting the same table and wait staff every night, my wife has stage four cancer and we kind of need the flexible dining based on how she currently feels. With that in mind, your suggestion is certainly a great one to get consistent service. After the first few days they get to know you and everything that your heart desires. It’s just waiting there for you. With this in mind, perhaps the newer trends in cruising with flexible everything leads to a decline in service where traditional cruising with early and late dining times, etc. probably creates more consistency. Same thing with the app, while I am a techie and love the idea of the app, anytime, you add systems that can fail in the middle you create issues and to your point if I were just dealing with human beings and found a bartender that I liked. I would probably be more than happy.

I am looking for advice as to whom I can speak to on board regarding what so far has been among the worst service on several fronts of any of the many cruises we have been on in hopes that it can improve during this sailing as we are only on the 3rd day. In the main dining room at all meals, it seems like you need to ask for things like butter multiple times before you have a chance to get it. Sometimes you will still never get it. They have forgotten to bring at least one dish in 4 of the 6 meals so far. It was not late, it simply never arrived. They will ask if you want bread near the beginning of the meal and a yes does not mean you will get it. We have had to ask for it again every time except once. Drink service through the app has been extremely slow and it seems like they advertise a completely different collection of wines on the app than they actually have on board. The same is true on the physical wine lists in the dining room. We have the premier drink package and they have a page that lists the wines by the glass on that package and they maybe have half of those wines. This problem results in most drink orders requiring a few discussions until you can find out what they do have as their menus are not trustworthy. The same is true of the signature cocktails, they are not able to make some of the drinks on the menu. The dining room also does not use the medallions for ordering, so they ask your room number and when I order wine for my wife and I, they end up putting both drinks under my account and by the end of tue day I run out of my 15 drinks between wine and coffee and my wife still has all of her maximum 15 drinks available and now I can’t use the app to use my drink package after dinner in the casino because I am out of drinks. The delivery time for drinks is also very very slow. When we order a drink on the app, it never arrives about half of the time and is sometimes just cancelled on me. Other times, it can take 40 minutes. I was in the casino today and ordered on the app as there were no bar servers walking around and it was 40 minutes until I flagged down a casino manager and asked about it and then it took another 15 minutes for the drink to actually arrive. We were on the Diamond princess in January and drink service was much faster. I do understand that these are “first world problems”, but when Princess is constantly pushing their Princess Plus and Premier packages and increasing those fees and then not delivering the promised selection of higher end drinks and making it very difficult to even get delivery of drinks. I’d think they in the casino they would have a constant flow of bar service to keep me drinking and gambling. That is nowhere near the case on this ship. We were on celebrity and Holland America in March and both has much better service. Any suggestions on who I can talk to on board to hopefully improve some of these service issues as we have another 13 days on this cruise.

I was on the celebrity beyond last week (3/19/23 - 3/26/23) and found zoom to be unusable if I was the presenter. I am a computer science professor, so know a little bit about tech, and I tried to give three 50 minute lectures during the cruise and the students could not understand me at all. I did some testing and found that the upload speed was very limited (around 0.5 Mbps) which would be the conduit by which my audio is transmitted. The real question is whether this is related to the internet source (Star Link) or the Network setup on Celebrity Beyond where they are perhaps giving priority to certain applications and throttling upload bandwidth to improve the overall experience across the ship. It does appear that it has been more common for Star Link speeds overall to be slower since late 2022 as more and more total people have adopted Star Link. I will note that there is a youtube channel I follow that uses star link currently to do their live streams and it seems to work well. They are using the stationary Star Link rather than the ones the cruise ships use to stay connected while moving. So I may not be comparing apple to apples there. I will note that the previous week we were on the Holland America Nieuw Statendam where I was able to meet over zoom without problem, yet streaming services like youtube were nearly unusable even though I did have the premium streaming internet package. Interestingly, youtube worked perfectly fine on the Celebrity Beyond, while zoom was unusable. I do have a suspicion that these differences are at least in part related to Celebrity's network decisions since I also noticed that if you tried to visit a competitor website (like princess.com) it was borderline unusable while at the same moment, the celebrity website was very usable. Perhaps a coincidence and I did not look into that further, but it was an observation I made. Long story short, I would maybe not trust Star Link on a cruise ship for zoom based on my experience, but overall internet did seem to be an improvement over traditional cruise ship internet.

I guess the lesson I learned here is to not mention anything about specific prices as folks try to reverse engineer everything and focus more on why/how I paid what I did rather than on my comments. I ended up in a normal (not neptune) suite in club orange. Since my original cruise was the "free" BINGO cruise its value was the cheapest inside room with zero promotional offers. After upgrading the room, upgrading to club orange, adding drinks packages and wifi, and all port fees things simply add up. Regardless... my original comments stand and my goal was to inform. I wanted to present my experience to others so they can decide if the things that I liked/disliked were important to them to ultimately decide if HAL was for them and more specifically if the NS was the right ship for them. It was not for me for the reasons I explained above. This week I am on the Celebrity Beyond in an Aqua Sky Suite in the Retreat and as speculated the experience is far superior (at a higher cost of course), but it isn't perfect. I will be posting that review in a different thread with the same goal in mind. Present my experience, and let the reader decide for themselves if that experience sounds good for them and then they can research the actual cost and decide if it is worth the price to them. As a final comment, I will say that for those of you who do assume that a "free cruise" is this amazing perk, it has a lot of "constraints" associated with it. In hindsight, I did find out too late that I could have used the BINGO certificate for a credit toward ANY cruise when the certificate itself says it has to be a Caribbean or Western Mexico non holiday cruise. I think I could have squeezed more value out of it than I did with this BINGO certificate. I'd estimate that the perk ended up giving me about $900 in value when all was said and done, and I think that much of that value was lost because I was not able to take advantage of current advertised perks. I'm afraid to do the math, but it is entirely possible that I would have actually ended up paying less total had I not used the certificate with the current promotions. In any case, we did have a nice time and I appreciate all of you who had constructive responses and questions.

Yea, no worries

I don’t gamble, my wife likes to do the manual dobber thing for bingo and I use the iPad and drink.

No young children in club orange, there was one family with 10-12 year olds, but they were not an issue at all.

We also added drink packages and some other things that did not come with the base room since the “have it all” promotion did not apply. In any case, I am speaking in generalities in that Club Orange seems to be Holland America’s answer to other lines more exclusive experiences. Perhaps, as you said, it doesn’t promise all of the bells and whistles that some might, but at the very least Priority Access and Priority Line (which does at least imply skip the line) were not noticeable perks in our experience. All in all, I am not knocking Holland America. We had a nice time, the ship was just not for us and I wanted to share with the community our experience so they could decide if the ship was for them. As I said in a previous post, folks who seemed to really be into live music seemed to really enjoy it. For us the ship was too small which I think automatically leads to more crowded areas and there were too many young people which is typically a perk of lines like Holland America for us. There is nothing wrong with young people and it’s great to see young families cruising, it is just not the atmosphere we prefer. The previous time we were on this ship there was 1 kid on board and the average age was maybe 65. We liked that. Some people won’t and that is why we have different brands for different experiences. I was simply underwhelmed with the club orange experience. As you implied, maybe I had false expectations.

We did not have an issue with club orange dining after the first night. We were able to get in with no wait and usually could get a low top table which my wife prefers. Starting tomorrow we are on the celebrity beyond in an aqua sky suite in the retreat. I would think that among “big brands / big ships” this should be as telling as anything as to whether “Skip the line” or a “ship within a ship” is possible. I’ll report back with my findings on that, but I do have high expectations.

Yes we won the cruise playing bingo and then paid a significant amount to upgrade to a suite for club orange in hopes that it would improve the overall experience. I agree that if this was a 100% free cruise then we really can’t complain about anything, but given we spent an additional $6000 plus the cost of all the bingo when we didn’t win lol, I think my expectations are reasonable when they advertise club orange as a “skip the line” experience etc…. If I book the cheapest inside room then the trade off is that I may have some waiting, but when the cruise line advertises their elevated products as a “ship within a ship” etc… my expectations increase.

We are on deck 6, the room service has been very good.

Just wanted to add some additional observations now that we are nearing the end of the week. One thing the captain said at one of the events this week really rings true for me. Some cruise lines, like Royal Caribbean, focus on making the ship the destination while Holland America focuses on the actual destinations. We have found the ship to be fairly boring compared to other larger ships we have sailed from Princess, Royal Caribbean, and Norwegian. Here are some additional good and bad things observed during the week. Notice that some reiterate previous comments or amend them: The bad: - you spend too much of your day waiting in line…even is advertised priority lines for Club Orange. - it seems common that the bartenders are not service oriented. I don’t want to throw them under the bus as I know they have hard jobs and have to put up with a lot of crap from people and work hours that I could not work myself. Having said that, it is still the job they have and too often I’d be standing at a bar and there are 1-3 bartenders/waitstaff standing there doing nothing while another one makes a drink and rather than taking an order or at least acknowledging they they will be with you in a moment, stand there chit chatting and seemingly ignoring you. It is a common theme in threads to talk about how understaffed, over worked, and underpaid these workers are to which I am sympathetic, but as paying customers, it is not unreasonable to expect good service. If the cruise lines need to charge more to deliver good service, so be it, but what I have seen is an increase in cost and a decrease in service across the board. For example, no lobster night in the dining room. This is a long time cruise tradition that in and of itself isn’t the end of the world, but is just one of many things like that that all add up. At least there were up charge options on the breakfast/lunch/dinner menus to get lobster or an elevated steak. The price was like $15 for two lobster tails and $15-$20 for steaks from the steakhouse, and $12 for the lobster eggs Benedict at breakfast. I think these are all reasonable up charges for the elevated menu items. -untrained workers in the buffet…just giving an example, we were in the ice cream line and the couple in front of us asked if they had coconut ice cream, the guy pointed at one and said yes and then served them. When we were next and a different guy was helping us he scooped us butter pecan from the same container. The other folks returned and said that what they got was not coconut and the worker said that the other guy didn’t know what he was doing. While this likely was not a major deal in this exact instance, to be so cavalier with food ingredients can be dangerous. Obviously the passenger has to take the responsibility for serious allergies etc…, but in general, it was common to run into crew members who did not seem to know very much about their job. - not enough entertainment options… unless you are into live rock and roll and blues music your options will be limited. We are not load music folks so I’d estimate that 70% of the available entertainment was lost on us. We did enjoy the live orchestra music when it was available and went to the few comedy shows. There really were not production shows as seen on other cruise lines and overall the world stage felt under utilized for the technology it has. The multimedia show that featured a movie across the many screens with the live orchestra playing was a highlight. I do want to point out that I did speak with several people who really do enjoy the loader live music and these people seems very happy with the entertainment. So I guess ask yourself what you like and decide if this ship is for you. - crowded or out of service elevators…this kind of speaks for itself, it was the worst on around arrival and on board time on port days and basically all day on sea days. You would sometimes wait 10 minutes for an elevator only to have a completely packed elevator open when one arrives. It became common practice to just take the stairs. Not the end of the world if only going a few flights for us, but many people can’t do stairs at all and this would be a miserable part of their trip. The good-ish: - I can’t really speak to the main dining room, but the club orange dining room was mostly good. The staff were friendly and we only had a wait that very first night. My wife really did not like the decor or that some of the tables are high top tables. I personally did not mind. While the menus were the same, club orange has its own kitchen and most of the time they prepared your food there. I feel like this translated into a bit of a better experience when it came to customizing etc.., but it was not amazing or anything. The service really should have been better in club orange as well. It was common for wine glasses to sit empty for awhile before being offered another drink. It wasn’t bad, just lacked the polished touch expected in the suite class dining room. - the captain seemed entertaining, his English was very good -the shower was a very good size with incredible water pressure…very rare find on a cruise ship - the room stewards were very efficient…whenever we left the room in the morning it was always made up by the time we returned and the same thing at night. Whenever we needed anything it was promptly done. While we did not have a ton of interactions with these guys, their work ethic was obvious. I can say with good confidence that we would not choose Holland America again simply on the basis of the ship being boring for us. The line as a whole was above average quality with above average food, and frankly fairly reasonable drink package prices compared to other lines. Hopefully this helps you make a decision if Holland America will be a good line for you.

This is our second time on this ship (first time was in 2019). We cruise a lot and tend to chase specific new ships rather than specific brands although we do like Princess the best currently with their medallions and ability to summon food and drinks to wherever you are. In any case, we had won a free cruise playing bingo the last time we sailed Holland America, so here we are. We did upgrade the room to Club Orange in a veranda since the Bingo free cruise is the cheapest inside state room category. I just wanted to give a quick good/bad of our experience so far in case others can benefit. Let me know if you have specific questions and I’ll try to answer them. Good: - room is fairly nice and balcony is a good size. Room overall is on the small size, but adequate. The shower is larger than most with a sliding glass door and the best water pressure I have had on a cruise ship. - food quality has been good in both the buffet and club orange dining rooms - wine selection is good in the dining room with Silverado Napa Cab being their best cab by the glass. Plenty of nicer wines by the bottle. I am on the quench non-alcoholic package as I want flexibility with the wine I drink rather than be locked into a by the glass list. -PRO Tip: I’d say I regret getting the quench package and should have just gotten the soda fountain package. The greater non-alcoholic options are not worth the price difference especially given the crowded bars. Save your money for extra wine and save time by filling your own Coke Zero at the machine. They have a daily happy hour at Billboard on deck 2 that is 25% off all drinks if you want to try something interesting. Bad: - the most kids I have seen on Holland America -ship feels very crowded with long waits for drinks at most bars and the drinks feel like they are rushed when they finally are made. We had a 30 minute wait for dinner last night at the private club orange dining room at 630pm, which boasts about no waits. The food was good in the end and breakfast in club orange this morning was not a problem and it comes with complimentary mimosas (no drink package required) -ship is small compared to many (100,000 tons compared to newer ships being in the 150k - 170k tons and the Oasis class ships tipping the scales at nearly 250,000 tons). This translates into a ship where you can get around quickly, but there are limited areas to explore and everything feels squeezed in from furniture to events. Last night they asked us to wait in the nearby lounge which was getting ready to host a PRIDE event. Not our cup of tea, but regardless, was very busy with zero seating available. -staff seems friendly, but overworked as is the trend on most ships. Our servers in the dining rooms have been extremely good while bar service has been more hit and miss. Summary ill post some more if I have additional comments as the cruise continues, but we likely will not sail Holland America again. I think we mostly felt that way after the first time in 2019, but we had a free cruise to use 🙂. I will say that jn 2019 one of the major perks for me was no kids which offset some of these other comments, but that isn’t the current situation.