Holland Westerdam was a disappointment

Cruises: 4-6 cruises

Review: 1

Helpful Votes: 4

Review summary

The stewarts were wonderful! Kind, helpful, and kept our rooms wonderfully clean. The food service was horrid! One night we went to the open dining, the food was good, but we saw our waiter take the butter and bread from our table, refill them, and then deliver them to another table. The buffet was a real bad experience. We had to get our own drinks and more times than not there were no glasses and/or cups. We had to wait up to 20-30 minutes for clean dishes. There was almost never any clean spoons for stirring coffee. Plenty of dirty ones, but no clean ones. One time I asked a server to clean a table and do the set-ups (silverware), and he pointed behind me and told me the set-ups were there. I then told him I needed the table cleaned again and this time he saw I was upset and he did clean the table and place the set-ups. Two times they wiped our table with a dirty napkin from the people who had just left, and then put our set-ups there for us to eat. Rarely did anyone come around to refill glasses -- 95% of the time we had to do our own refills, get different drinks, etc. There was not a good selection of foods. Each day there was Italian, hot foods, sandwiches, and salads. The last day there were steaks. There was always mexican food, but they ran completely out of taco shells the fifth day. The buffet was not open enough!!! One day we docked at 6:00 p.m., and they opened the buffet for the evening meal at 5:30. One night I went down at 8:50 to eat, and all that was available was Italian and I had to yell for someone to come out to fill my order. At 9:30 my brother-in-law only had two old slabs of pizza available to eat. I understand that buffets have to close for clean-ups and things, but numerous times there was no food available or just a single choice. This buffet did not have a good selection of foods, they were not open with good selections, and the service was lousy. We heard two cooks get into a screaming argument and one of them was forced to leave the serving line. As I stated above, the stewarts did a wonderful job, the activities on the ship were okay, the crew was efficient and obliging, but the buffet was such a disappointment that we will not cruise this line again.

Ship experiences

Food and Dining

Entertainment

Service and Staff

Ship Quality

Cabin / Stateroom

Pros: Clean rooms

Cons: Food and service for buffet

Recommends Westerdam? No.