Volendam Review

4.0 / 5.0
591 reviews

Volendam - Southern Caribbean

Review for the Southern Caribbean Cruise on Volendam
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SassyGirl
First Time Cruiser • Age 20s

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Sail Date: Mar 2005

My mother and I went on the Volendam to the Southern Caribbean (she is 62, I am 39). Previously, we have sailed on Celebrity twice (on the Century to the Eastern and Western Caribbean). We ended up on this cruise last-minute. We were booked to go on the Celebrity Infinity to Hawaii, but the cruise was cancelled due to mechanical problems, so we scrambled to find another cruise to book ourselves on. Since I had read good things about HAL, we decided to try this cruise.

We were a little disappointed with this cruise. While we would rate it "good" overall (whereas we would rate our Celebrity cruises "excellent"), there were a couple things that disappointed us. Holland caters to elderly people, and we kind of knew this going in (I had read this on the cruise boards) but we decided to give it a try. The biggest problem with the cruise was that unless you are 65 or older and love sedate, loungy music, there is nowhere on the ship at night to dance (up-tempo). Every night, my mom and me would walk around from bar to bar (I think there are 3 or 4 of them) trying to find an upbeat bar where we could dance and not one was to be found. Worst of all, each bar was playing the same exact type of music (even some of the same songs!) - from the piano bar, to the "Crows Nest" - it was the same thing over and over again - old standards, Broadway songs, jazzy slow songs.

There were a couple appealing-sounding nights listed on the activity calendar, like "70's disco night", but they were scheduled at around midnight on nights when we were going into port the next morning, so it wasn't feasible for us to stay up that late. We wished they would have had ONE bar on the ship dedicated the upbeat dance music for the younger crowd or even the older people who still have the pep to dance up-tempo. As I mentioned, my mom is 62, and even she was bored with the loungy bars (a couple other older passengers we spoke with were also commenting on this).

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