This was our 2nd time on the Oosterdam, our 6th HAL cruise and over our 30th cruise overall. We live in southern CA, so this was an easy trip for us. We drove to the ship in San Diego and mainly went for the cruise experience, as we've done this run several times before, including 24 months ago exactly on this same Thanksgiving Oosterdam sailing.
This review will deal mainly with the ship and cruise experience and not the ports or itinerary, as they were not of great interest to us.
This should have been a great cruise and ended up being merely a good one. We were disappointed by several aspects of it, as I will explain. I will begin by saying how disappointed we were to BE disappointed. We love HAL and the Oosterdam and were very excited to be doing this holiday cruise again. Previous HAL experiences have been so positive we expected more of the same.