First a bit about us. My wife and I are 48 & 50 years old, and have been married for four years. We have taken nine cruises together (HAL, Princess, Norwegian, Carnival, and MSC). Our Honeymoon was on the HAL Westerdam (inaugural Atlantic crossing 11/04).

Embarkation We arrived at the port at 11:30am and were on the ship by Noon. We were asked to go to the Lido deck and await the call to our room, since none of the rooms were ready yet, we expected this since we boarded so early. The food at the buffet was ok. At 1:45pm the announcement came that all rooms were ready. Many of the passengers were over 65. This was expected being a fifteen day HAL cruise. This was not a problem at all.

Stateroom We went to our deck three inside stateroom and found it to be very clean and set up the way we requested. Our room steward (Jamie) showed up about 10 minutes later with all our luggage. I asked him if he could get us an egg create mattress topper. Ten minutes later he showed up with it. Jamie was great throughout the entire cruise. Our room was not cleaned till after 2pm daily. But it was always very clean. We did have a problem with the air conditioning throughout the entire cruise. The room would not get below 73 degrees. We notified the front desk every day for the first 7 days; they sent people to check it out every day. They also followed up with us every night. They never could do anything to fix it so they gave us a fan to use after the second day (it helped). They also offered to move us to another room, but only offered smaller rooms in less desirable locations. So we stayed in our original room. The cruise line offered us a $100 credit due to the A/C problem. We negotiated it up to $200. The front office staff was very accommodating. Our stateroom was very quiet throughout the entire cruise. Read more