I am top level with Cunard and Princess. I needed a one week Caribbean cruise near Christmas. Cunard only had a 2 week from New York and Princess didn't fit my dates. I hadn't sailed Holland America since 1973 so I decided to try it. I knew I made a mistake the minute I walked on board Eurodam. The atrium area was dreary and had no activities around it. Other complaints included running out of English Breakfast Tea Bags in the dining room at breakfast and running out of vanilla ice cream at the buffet. The wait for your food after being seated in the dining room for breakfast was 45 minutes to an hour every morning. There were never enough lounge chairs at the pools when at sea. The gift shop only had size small for the tee shirts I needed and no model ships which I wanted. Poor ordering. The buffet has ridiculous hours. It closes between 1030-1130, 230-530, and 830-1030PM. It opens from 1030PM-1130PM and if you are hungry after 1130 you are out of luck except for room service. Pizza is not by the slice and the wait for a whole pie is always 20-30 minutes. Explorations cafe offers fresh baked chocolate chip cookies but when they are open they are out of them. The internet didn't work. The wakeup call feature on my in room phone never worked despite my complaining. I have sailed on 100+ cruises and this was the only one that didn't serve Baked Alaska the last night or any night. The line is so cheap that on sea days crew tried to sell animal cracker cookies to kids for $1.

The bar stewards on deck were way too pushy with the drinks. The final straw was disembarkation. They gave EXPEDITE tags to over 500 people for 715AM. The lines were ridiculous. They could have staggered it to 715, 730 , 745 etc. Finally, I would like to say that my detailed letter to HAL customer service and my survey were IGNORED. NEVER AGAIN. I would have enjoyed Titanic more. At least they had some excitement at the end!