Westerdam Review

Westerdam - Eastern Caribbean

Review for the Eastern Caribbean Cruise on Westerdam
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Schplinky
First Time Cruiser • Age 50s

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Sail Date: Jan 2007
Cabin: Deluxe Ocean-View Verandah Stateroom

If you like good quick cruise reviews, its time for you to move on, my friend. This is going to be long one. We just got back from HAL's Westerdam and because it was a new line for us, we seem to have a lot of observations to share.

I don't enjoy reviews where folks write about HAL vs. Celebrity or RCL vs Princess or whatever. It seems to me to make cruising sound like a smackdown WWF match and, more to the point, the only people qualified to make such sweeping comparisons are those who continue to sail a good variety of ships on all lines. Too often, there are inflammatory posts on these boards from people who denigrate this line or that and then you discover they have never sailed that line or have not done so in years. This is misleading to new readers. The Holland America of today is different than the HAL of five years ago (if writers on this board are to be believed) and so it seems illogical to base one's conclusions about an entire line on one cruise from years earlier or on only one ship. Also, I think that sailing on Holland America on Westerdam (a new, larger ship) will be a different experience than those sailing on, say Prisendam so when folks complain about Carnival (a line I have yet to sail) because they went on one three day cruise on an old Carnival ship five years ago, that doesn't seem to inform a person's decision to sail on one of that line's newer megaliners today.

All this is to say that I am not attempting to review HAL as a line so much as this will be a review of my one sailing on Westerdam. If things were different on the ship that you sailed or on your sailing of Westerdam, that's fine but this will be a record of our experience on Westerdam. We have only RCL and Celebrity to compare it to and at times, we found ourselves doing that both positively and negatively. These are our observations and yours may surely be different.

Cabin Review

Deluxe Ocean-View Verandah Stateroom

Cabin VA
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