Holland America - we took the Mediterranean Cruise last year and loved it (highly recommend) so we booked the Panama Canal Cruise this year. Also have booked the 14 day Baltic Cruise for next year. I think HAL does a good job but this is not the cruise to take.

Stateroom - worst problem on this cruise was our cabin. It has a "squeak" in the closet area that was enough to keep you awake at night. I told our cabin steward about it and he reported it to his supervisor and then guess it made it to the front desk because a lady called to discuss the problem. She came to our cabin and I pointed out the squeak (it always occurred while the ship was moving). She heard the problem and then went and got a carpenter from the maintenance crew and came back and he pushed here and there and said he would come back later with tools. He scheduled to come back while we were at dinner and when we returned to the room it was still squeaking. I had a voice message from the lady wanting to know if they had fixed the problem. I called her back and told her they had not. I heard nothing further from her. She did send us a plate of chocolates and a bottle of wine for our inconvenience but did not solve the problem. I wrote in my review of the cruise that the proper procedure would be to continue to find the problem until fixed or relocate us to another stateroom. The next to last night at sea we had big waves and the ship was rocking and our squeak turned into a roar. I did take my iphone and recorded the noise and hope to send it to someone at HAL. We were VERY DISAPPOINTED in their response.

The ship - the MS Statendam is in need of a facelift. There is quite a bit of deferred maintenance (missing light covers, missing hardware, broken basketball goals, etc). The cleanliness is good, however. Read more