Westerdam Review
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Additional details
Point of reference: this was our nineteen cruise, fifth for me (and fourth for my husband) on HAL. We’d sailed Westerdam almost ten years previously for our honeymoon. We’ve also sailed on Royal Caribbean, Carnival, and Celebrity.
Embarkation: thanks to some extra time, we drove to Port Everglades from our home in Virginia, staying overnight in Jacksonville. The hotel we used was so unremarkable, it doesn’t bear mentioning here. The next morning, we finished the drive into Fort Lauderdale – meeting a not-insignificant line to pull in to the off-pier Park and Go lot. However, things moved relatively quickly: I’d estimate from parking line to embarkation hall was perhaps an hour, tops. There were more lines to check-in arrivals, but it, too, moved quickly – we were dropping off our luggage in our room by 1:30 via way of the maitre’d, who was able to get us moved from open seating to late traditional seating (our vast preference due to husband’s unusual food allergies).
Post-luggage drop, we swung by the guest services (I will always think of it as the purser’s) desk to put cash down on our onboard account. The biggest sticking point we’ve had with HAL is their insistence of having $60 per person per day available on a credit card for our onboard purchases: I’m sure they’d like us to spend $840 during our week’s sailing, but it’s NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. So this time we decided to set up with cash – and learned, at the desk, that you actually DO have some flexibility if it’s a cash setup: we opted to start with $500. Lesson learned.
Cabin Review
We’ve lucked into larger staterooms on other lines in the recent past, but this was not in the budget this time around (we landed a stellar past-passenger deal). The room, if you removed the furniture and bathroom, would be roughly the size of a generous walk-in closet. However, most everything in the room was smartly laid out to give as much useable space as possible – each side of the bed has enough room to walk around the side of it, and there is adequate closet and drawer space. The standard chair and table, however, really doesn’t have enough room to be usable if you are of any height or girth to speak of. It can also be challenging getting ready for dinner, as the bathroom door blocks easy access to the closet behind it, and the only plugs are at the desk between the closets and the bed, which means you’re putting on makeup in front of a mirror with only one side lit, but it can be done.
We did notice that, unlike our past few sailings on other ships, the movement of the ship and engine working was much more noticeable in this cabin. Perhaps that’s because we were more forward than we have been, but given the amount of vibrations felt when the engines were full power, or we ‘banged’ into a hard wave driving forward (and our past experience on the same ship on the outside passage of Alaska), it’s probably not the best ship to be on if you’re prone to motion sickness unless you have a cabin far lower and more midship. Having said that, we tend not to spend much time in our cabin, so it didn’t bother us much except when sleeping.