Let me start by saying that I really wanted and was looking forward to a wonderful cruise. I heard nothing but great reviews (mostly). This whole trip started before the pandemic as my fiancé, and I purchased a 17-day Hawaiian island cruise( we were going to marry and the cruise was our honeymoon) that was cancelled due to the pandemic (No fault of Holland). Long story short after fighting with them for refund, we were given half our money back toward a cruise credit. We settled on the Mexican Riviera out of San Diego. Like everyone else around the world we were so excited to kind of return to some form of normality.
We prepaid for our excursions, crew gratuity and shuttle to and from the airport (via Holland bus). We arrived at the airport and the Holland Employees gathered us all in a group as we waited for the bus to arrive. We were told that it will be around an hour as they are offloading passengers from another cruise. I thought to myself for an hour? Is that enough time to turn the ship back around and clean? No other instructions were given to prepare us on arrival at the terminal. As we arrived and offloaded, it became horrible fast. A young lady was yelling that all blue ticket holders need to gather behind her and form a line (she was yelling and waving us toward her. Luckily about 20 minutes waiting in line and a guest asked another Holland employee why we were waiting in line as we prepaid to bypass the line and onboard first. The lady rolled her eyes and told us that we did not need to wait in line and to follow her. So much for prepaying and training!
We finally got to our room and upon walking the corridor and entering our room we could smell what was described by the rest of the passengers like "raw sewage" (more on that later) We chose our accommodations at the rear of the ship as we heard nothing but great experiences and wanted to give it a whirl. Our quarters were very roomy, the bed was comfortable, and the rest room was very spacious (or so I thought). We had a veranda like deck, it was awesome. As we settled in, I noticed a large amount of wadded up ball of grey hair on the floor, and on closer inspection the furniture and our bed was also covered in this old lady grey hair. The carpet had food stains and found what looked to be cereal flakes underneath the desk that had been there for quite a while. The room was not cleaned but tidied up for passenger turnover. We called housekeeping and they cleaned up and apologized (no fault of their own) Housekeeping is set up to fail (more on that later). I'm not going to give out our room number as that would narrow down who was taking care of us and could lead to retaliation on Holland's part.