My wife and I (a senior couple) chose a back-to-back on the Westerdam in January to Mexico and Hawaii to try to get away from the cold, wind, and rain of a Victoria January. We had sailed once before with the line, on the old "Noordam" in 2003. That trip had been a disaster - the ship was long after its "Best Before" date (and was retired within a year). We had been promised an early dinner seating, but were given 8:30 pm with no option to change on board. The ship was very dusty (we both have dust allergies). I got some sunstroke in St Lucia and the ship's doctor quarantined us both for three days in our 'stateroom', after which she especially was quite sick. Between that trip in 2003 and our latest trip in January on the Westerdam, we have taken around 70 cruises, all on other cruise lines. However, we decided to give Holland America another chance. Sure enough, the Westerdam was also past its "best before" date. Part of our window sill had rotted. Some doors did not close (I even found two toilet cubicles with doors that didn't lock. It turns out the ship will have a refit in March, too late to do us any good. The service was uneven, sometimes very good, sometimes poor. The ship was the second worst we have been on at dealing with my soy and corn allergies, and as a result we left the ship after the two cruises with my right arm completely broken out with eczema. The ship refused to recognize that we were returning passengers, not that we necessarily would have attended their "Mariner" functions, but we should have been invited. The shuffle board was a disgrace - it was impossible to get the rock more than half way to the house! Twice the salmon dish ordered by my wife arrived with the center completely raw. We found that the coffee shop, which offered both ordinary lattes and soy lattes, did not clean the machine properly between the two types. We also found enormous lines to disembark the ship.

There were positives - to our surprise, the ship offered a digital workshop, which included excellent lectures on Windows 10. And, when the captain found that, due to high swells, it was not safe to go to all five of the scheduled ports, he scheduled a night time pass within a mile of the place where Kilauea volcano flows into the ocean - a once-in-a-lifetime experience.