MicCanberra

We were not alone in our experience for this particular cruise, on a fb page for our cruise, there were numerous others making note of the service or lack thereof. Such as these 2 comments. 1) This has been a wonderful cruise. I can’t say enough about it. But… has anyone experienced the dining room as the worst place to eat? I have tried to be nice but after an hour and a half waiting for our dinner, it is a bit much. We have also had to ask for drinks. Our waiter seems to have deserted us. The salad was not up to par and I am not sure if we will ever see our dinner. This is our first time in the dining room and will probably be the last for this cruise. It’s really not busy either. Not sure what’s going on. We are a 4 star and have never had this happen. 2) We were on second floor the first few nights of cruise and found service to be sketchy. Got lucky and have a set time and table at 8 pm on floor 3. Service and food have been fabulous.

Yet, it has been met on Hal, just not consistently in the anytime dining.

A nice strategy but it effectively takes away the anytime dining. We like to eat when we feel like eating which is sometimes early, sometimes late and most times in between. That is why fixed dining doesn't suit us. Another reason is we often catch up with others to dine with, fixed dining doesn't cater for that.

Thanks, that more or less is what I was getting at, which is why I didn't put traditional dining in with open dining. We prefer open and do not expect the waiters to know our likes or dislikes prior to them meeting us. We do however expect to have water and bread within 5 minutes of being seated. We do expect to have drink orders taken within another 5 minutes after that. we do expect to have our food orders within 5-10 minutes after that, which means with 20 minutes of sitting down. Once we ordered we expect a 10-15 minute wait between courses. I do not think that is unreasonable and some nights it was delivered, others it was even quicker but some nights it was no where near being like that.

Okay, so we are not the only ones or on the only ship. I do hope it is more consistently good service in the future.

Hi Tina The food was very good to great, it was the service which was inconsistent. It certainly didn't ruin our cruise, the itinerary more than makes up for that but it was such a turn off that it has made us wary about booking HAL again. As mentioned we were open dining, one night we did get brought up to a empty table on the 3rd floor and service was absolutely fantastic. This just highlighted the difference between the servers and service.

It is a risk, perhaps have insurance and also a back up plan.

I will have a look as well. Some issues were reported, like I said it was hit and miss. The managers said they will try to do better. Some nights it was fine but then others it was atrocious. The staff were quite busy which is why I thought they may be stretched.

Excellent news, I know there was some staff turnover as we saw numerous crew debarking and embarking at some ports on the cruise but do not know if they were all dining staff.

That is good to hear.

We have just returned from 22 nights on the Oosterdam. It was our 3rd cruise with HAL (1st Hal cruise after Covid) but we have cruised a lot and generally most dining rooms operate similarly until this one. We were very disappointed in the MDR dining experience, it seemed to be very hit and miss as some nights the service was fine and others it was atrocious. The food was good to great but the service was far from it. It wasn't just slow but there were many mistakes with orders. I cannot comment for the Traditional dining as we were open dining. On one night we were seated for 1 hour before our orders were taken, service was generally very slow and it seemed to me that there were staff missing compared with other cruises we have been on. We were not the only ones to notice the bad service, as others had also mentioned it when mentioned. Many staff seemed inexperienced and also got orders wrong, and in some cases forgot orders altogether. My questions are, Was it just our cruise/ ship, or is it occuring fleet wide?, is it cost cutting having less staff doing more? Cheers Mic

France

such a shame

We have used the credit card at the banks rate rather than 5he cruiselines rate. However lately on some lines, we have been loading our ship board account with OBC (some lines have more favourable ratess than the current exchangerate) and using that to have a $0 bill.

Concepcion, Chile

Not there but in some ways they are similar.

Correct

We have a Ubank account, have used it overseas but not for a cash advance as yet, will be using it next week for that purpose though.

You were lucky, many lost everything on their cancelled cruises, we only lost a deposit. The thing that bugs me most is they set up the new company almost straight away.

It is Chile but where.

Not Canada.

For Rosie.

NOTE- Recently on a South American cruise, people were debarked half way through the cruise due to having, A) no visa for Chile, B) the wrong type of visa, C) their visa had expired. Do not rely on the cruiseline to tell you or organise it, check it yourself and organise it yourself.