My husband and I had a terrific European cruise with Holland America on the Rotterdam back in 2006. A group of 8 of us cruised together at that time. We decided to arrange another group cruise and this time there were 10 of us. We all looked forward to the Boston-Montreal cruise on the Maasdam (first time for us on this ship). Our experience with Holland America's staff and this cruise ship were so polar-different than what we experienced in Europe. It is almost hard to know where to start in telling you how disappointing this cruise was.

First and foremost, my husband and I had a non-working toilet in our bathroom for most of the cruise. Our bathroom flooded on 3 different occasions. The first night I still had clothes in my duffel bag on the floor, which Holland America had to launder all the soiled clothes. When we spoke to management, there was a vacuum system issue with the plumbing on the ship, which affected many of the public areas too (Lido Deck, Crow's Nest, Showroom areas). The public bathrooms were dirty and smelled. Often times they were closed for repairs. For our stateroom toilet, we had maintenance in our room on multiple occasions with no permanent fix to our flooding problem until late Wednesday (more than ½ through the cruise).

Due to Hurricane Irene, we were out to sea for more days than originally planned. We very much depended on Holland America's planned activities to engage with, as we were all trying to make the most of being out to sea unexpectedly from the onset of the cruise. I was shocked to see that in showing up for events like ping pong and Scattegories, there was no Holland America representative on hand and no one to run the activity. Even worse, the ping pong tables were broken! Holland Americas Lido Deck bartenders brought out the ping pong tables and left them on the floor broken. One cruise ship passenger took it upon himself to fix one of the tables (thankfully!). The 2nd table was never fixed. Read more