We just finished 28 days on Holland America's Rotterdam. The cruise was a DISASTER. We have cruised with HAL for well over 100 days and have noticed a continual downward trend in quality for their ships and service. We have been on three of their ships within the past 14 months and our opinion is that the cruise line is getting worse by the day. We feel that the company is putting revenue as a priority over service to the passengers. They are asking their workers to do more with fewer personnel and the cruise experience reflects this. Ships are more dirty, workers are not as friendly and happy and services offered are geared toward selling HAL products instead of providing a pleasant cruise experience.

During the early part of our 28 days there were a lot of people getting sick with GI virus. This was the same problem the same ship had back in January of this year according to other blog entries. To solve the problem, they pulled a lot of the staff from around the ship and put them to work spraying cleaning solution EVERYWHERE. They had people walking around the ship with canisters of this solution strapped to their back. They sprayed everything in sight to include walls, windows, doors and floors. They had teams of people who went into the rooms when we were out to spray the floors and who knows what else with this solution. They never informed us of this but we caught them when we returned to the ship early one day. We had tooth brushes drinking glasses, and other personal items sitting out and I am sure the overspray got on everything. This could not be healthy for anyone. In fact the teams doing the spraying in the rooms were wearing gas masks and rubber gloves when doing the work. HAL never notified us about the spraying in the rooms or we would have protected ourselves by putting things away and not using the glasses in the room. This cleaning solution was applied to everything in common areas. There was so much on the tables that it dripped to the floor and everything became sticky. Plates stuck to the tables, our feet stuck to the floor and you could see on the walls where the solution had run down to the floor. Again, this could not be good for the passengers to be exposed to.

On two occasions I sat down on chairs that had a cloth pad on the seat and discovered it was soaked in cleaning solution. I had to return to the room, shower and change. One time I set a cloth bag on the table and discovered the table was covered with cleaning solution. The part of the bag that I didn't wash off good became bleached white. What was this solution? Read more