Lessons Learned First Cruise with Holland America Cruise Line

Hey everybody, I'm Josh.

And I'm Rachael.

And we are about to disembark on our first Holland America cruise, and we want to let you know what our experience was like as first-timers.

Let's go!

This was our first cruise with Holland America, but it's not our first cruise ever.

Yeah.

We have both cruised Over 15 times on Royal Caribbean, Princess, Carnival.

And Celebrity.

And Celebrity now. And this one, the reason why we ended up doing this is because we got a cruise offer from Wynn Las Vegas to be able to do a Holland America cruise. I then ended up going into, there's a place called Ocean Players Club where you can do match.

Kind of like a tier matching.

Yeah, a tier match or an offer match from land-based casinos to cruise ships. And so we were able to get a little bit better by showing off some of our MGM and our Wynn rewards.

Mm-hmm.

And so what we ended up doing is we went in, they offered us an interior room, which was still gonna cost about $800, but we ended up asking, are there some upgrades that we could pay for? And so we were able to get a veranda room that we could pick the room for about $1,600. So we thought that was a great value, and that's why we decided to try out Holland for the first time.

Especially, um, $1,600 for a balcony room when we knew the itinerary was going to Alaska.

Yes. Yeah, so we ended up doing Alaska, and it was a great time. It was a round trip. cruise from Vancouver. And so we want to just talk about this mostly in a pros and cons type scenario to give you an idea of what we liked, what we didn't like, and what we think could improve.

That's right. And first things first, we were pretty confident going into this cruise that the crowd was going to be much older than us.

Yes.

And we were pleasantly surprised that we were kind of middle of age of it. Um, we noticed some older people cruising, but we also noticed people with families and younger couples as well. So that actually was not just a pro, but kind of a surprise for us as we boarded this cruise.

Well, and also, you know, since we had just done Celebrity, we even heard from people on Celebrity thinking that Holland was more of a, I don't know, snooty, stuck-up style vibe, and it totally wasn't.

No.

And maybe that's because it was Alaska, but there was a lot of flannel shirts like me.

And a lot of hoodies.

Yes. Yeah, it was not over the top. Everybody dressed in tuxedos every night. And there was more children on this than our Celebrity cruise. So it was a very wide array of people.

Yes.

But let's get into some pros and cons. And the very first thing is something that we are split on, which is the app.

Yeah, the app. And we've gotten used to using the app on Celebrity and Royal Caribbean, and they were very, very similar, and we thought they were very easy and user-friendly. The app on Holland is a little bit more different, even from trying to book things on the the app prior to, it was easier just to use a computer.

Yes.

So just use the desktop. Um, at the check-in for the port itself, it didn't work. We had just our printed or our PDF versions of our boarding pass and they wouldn't allow that, so they had to print that off for us. So it was kind of a hit and miss on the app, especially within the first 2 days, I would say.

Yeah, and something else we didn't enjoy about the app was that you couldn't find the MDR or main dining room menu days in advance. You were only looking at the main dining room menu that day of.

Yes.

And I didn't notice a menu outside the main dining room either. So if you were trying to decide if you wanted to spend extra for specialty dining or go to the main dining room, you really didn't know until the day of. Now there were some pros about the app though. One of them was something that blew us away. You were able to order food on your app at either the New York Deli, which was sandwiches and pizzas, as well as Dive-In, which was at the pool and it had sandwiches, Burgers, hot dogs, and fries. Yeah, that was awesome being able to do that and then walk up there 10-15 minutes later to get your food was great.

Yeah, it was wonderful to have that option. Also, when we first got on board, I asked Josh, we don't have shore excursion tickets. We found them on our app, so that was very convenient. And that even worked off the ship because our second time of using the shore excursion, we had to meet on the dock and it was perfect.

The other one is there is free messaging between, uh, people on The app without Wi-Fi, which that's not something that's always been on every app. And so it's really nice to be able to keep in touch with people if you don't have Wi-Fi, which we don't always have.

Yes.

That does get us to, uh, we're just gonna dive into pros now. There's a laundry list of pros. There's a lot of good things.

Yeah.

Make sure you hit that subscribe button if you want to see our full Alaskan experience while on Holland America's Koningsdam. We will have daily vlogs showing some of the best tips and tricks to make the most of your Alaskan cruise. Including excursions to Tracy Arm Fjord, the White Pass Railway, and some amazing wildlife encounters. We also showcased some of the best food and drink options in Juneau, Skagway, Ketchikan, and even Vancouver.

So the first one is we were able to research and purchase what they call the Have It All package. For us, the Have It All package included a specialty dining restaurant, a $100 shore excursion credit for each of us, drinks up to $11 a drink, and then the complimentary or the basic Wi-Fi. Not complimentary, basic Wi-Fi. Some offers we've heard can also include your gratuities, so you have to watch for that. I— we weren't sure of that, so we didn't, we didn't know to watch for that.

Yeah.

But we were pretty excited because I think that itself was about $420 a person, which if you've ever done the math on a drink package, you're gonna drink that easy.

Yeah, with Royal and Celebrity, we're easily spending— it's like $90 to $100 per day per person.

Yeah.

Um, I think our last one, it was 11 nights and it would have been $2,000 to have a drink package. So for us to be able to get this, plus we got $200 towards our shore excursions, plus we got specialty dining, which was I think $60 each. Yeah, that was a great, great deal for us. So we had been to Alaska before with Royal Caribbean, and we felt like the, the menu was the exact same as you'd get in the Caribbean, whereas on Holland there was itinerary-specific food items. Lots of Alaska featured food like crab, salmon, halibut.

They even had an Alaska brunch in the main dining room on, I guess you'd call them the sea days, which offered many different varieties including Reindeer sausage, steak and eggs. It was really kind of a unique experience to have that option here. In addition to the menus having specialties, they actually had specialty cocktails based around Alaska as well.

Yeah, we enjoyed the Sitka Spritz, apparently so much that the casino is not offering it today on the final day.

Yeah, that's what he told us. Oh, we're out of that.

I'm like, okay, fine. We did enjoy that there was a lot of itinerary-specific education. The first day we went to one about whales and one about nature. Our naturist spoke about where the best time to see animals would be and who's going to see it. Hint, the people that are looking for animals are going to find them.

Yes.

Yeah.

In addition, we did like a Skagway-specific one for our first port of call.

So that way, if you're trying to learn a little bit about your ports before you get to them, Holland does a great job of educating you. Food. The food has been great.

It has been really good. Surprisingly good, I would say.

Yes, uh, so we did do one specialty dining. We did the steakhouse and truly enjoyed all of it.

Yeah, it was very good. It was our very first night too, so that was nice.

Yeah, the casual dining, uh, the New York Deli with fresh pizza, which you can order your toppings, as well as the dive-in burgers, was great. The buffet— we'll get to that later.

Yeah, we'll get to the buffet.

But most of the food was very good, and including the main dining room. We have gone, I think, 3 times so far, and We decided tonight to not do specialty dining because we've enjoyed the main dining room that much.

Yeah, it was really good, and I thought for the most part it was all fresh and very reasonably good service.

Yes, and I also like about it the serving sizes are fairly small from what we've seen on some other cruise lines. Yeah, which does make it easy to be able to order more though. Yeah, and then which we like to do.

Yeah, but they never have looked at us like What?

When you're ordering more? No, they don't shame you for ordering a 3rd entrée or a 2nd appetizer, and that's been great.

Yeah, it has been nice.

We do have twice-a-day cabin steward service. Andy has been amazing.

He has been. He's greeted us by name every single time we see him.

Ever since the first time he met us.

Yeah, he's just kept our room extremely well kept. It's been wonderful.

Yeah, and the fact that they have twice a day is still important to us, which a lot of places— or a lot of cruise ships have gone away from.

One of the things we noticed, and as I mentioned earlier, with the Have It All package, we got the basic drink package included with that, which was drinks up to $11. There weren't that many drinks over $11.

Yeah.

We rarely had any problems with that. The other nice part was if you did order a drink over $11, you only paid for the extra piece.

Yeah.

So Josh had a couple, um, bourbons that were $12, so he paid $1. So it was pretty nice to see that.

Yeah, that was great to see. Yeah, you didn't have to like limit your options really. Oh man, this was great. Warm breakfast was available for free room service.

Yes.

We've gotten kind of accustomed to like continental breakfast. I mean, pastries and fruit. Yeah, pastries and fruit on Royal Caribbean. Whereas like here we will get sausage, eggs, toast, got our coffee delivered. You still can get the pastries and the cold cereal and stuff, but it was great to be able to get warm food.

It was very nice. One of the other pros, because I'm a sucker for it, is it was good drip coffee. The free coffee that was included was very good. Not bitter at all.

Which we have not always enjoyed it on cruise ships. And so sometimes you feel like you have to get a specialty coffee. I don't think we needed the specialty coffee, but we did get it.

Yeah, we did use it every now and then.

And we had to have it all packaged, so we had to.

Yeah. This one's your favorite.

Yeah, this one's mine. The glassware. I thought the glassware was some of the best that we've seen on any cruise ship.

In our cabin alone, we had 4 different glass options.

Yeah. But like the rocks glasses, if you like a good rocks glass, they have a fantastic one on Holland America.

Yeah. Another opportunity that we learned is pretty significant for Holland America itself and this cruise, and maybe even this ship because of the size of it, is the opportunity to cruise through Glacier Bay National Park. That was— I was initially expecting that to just simply be a sea day.

Yeah.

And it wasn't. It was so much more than a sea day. It was really a neat experience. They brought on park rangers and gave a presentation throughout. There was also Glacier Bay-specific merchandise you could purchase. They had Glacier Day-specific food items and drink items. It was really a neat experience to see that up close and personal.

You can even get your passport stamped.

Yeah, we didn't do that.

Yeah, but you end up getting to see at least 2 different glaciers. We saw a ton of animals. It was, it was fantastic. And then they served split pea soup, which we didn't like, but it was a cool experience to be able to standing out on the front of the ship as it's raining eating pea soup.

And what was the other? The Alaska Glühwein?

Yeah.

Yeah, that was really good too.

So like a warm spiced red wine basically. It was really good. Something else that you don't see in some of the lower tier cruise ships is they had shampoo, conditioner, and lotion in the room.

Yes.

You know, a lot of them are giving you just the 5-in-1 body wash, shampoo. This was very nice to have. Much appreciated.

Another thing that I really enjoyed, and that's maybe because we like it so much, is live music. There were multiple venues that had live music every single night and even during the day, I believe.

Yeah, so they had BB King's Blues Room, Billboard Onboard, and then Rolling Stone like rock room. So it was kind of neat because At night you would alternate between Rolling Stone and Billboard Onboard, and then BB King always had something going.

Yeah.

So there was always at least 2 different venues you could go to. So if you're into live music, that was great. And if you're not into live music, they have movies on demand in your room.

Which was nuts! And it wasn't just a small selection. There was a wide variety of movies to watch, and you could just click on it and press play, and you didn't have to be charged for it. We did end up watching a movie in our room one day.

We did. And if you want to hang out in your room, they had throw blankets that you could just—

Hang out.

Yeah, you don't have to get into the— all the way into the covers. You could take it out on your balcony, except for it was really cold for us and windy, so we didn't end up going out there. We just used it on top of the bed.

In addition to the throw blankets, they also had robes in your room as well, and they stocked it with beach towels.

Yeah.

Or pool towels, I guess. There's no beach.

Did you say umbrella also?

Oh, there was an umbrella.

And an umbrella. Yeah, they have a lot of amenities in here that you don't see on all cruise ships. And our final pro is a big one— theming.

Yes.

They theme very well. And so that goes everything from— there was a Holland Night, there's a Grand Dutch Cafe, which is your coffee shop which has a bunch of Dutch foods, which you don't see all the time. They had an Orange Party, there was split pea soup, there was the Glühwein, Alaskan Dutch-themed gifts on board, and the prices were decent.

And they also had a tea service Like a—

Yeah.

3 o'clock tea.

It was really cool how they, they stuck to that Holland theme, and I don't know, it's just something different. I like that.

Yeah, we haven't seen it everywhere, and I think that was a unique experience for us.

Yeah. Now, from a con standpoint, we did have some cons that we, we, we had kind of been prepared for some of these. Some of them, you know, they just really stood out the moment we got on. Um, one of them is night entertainment in the main theater. It just was a letdown for us. 4 of the 7 nights was either a magician or a comedian, which is not always the most exciting on Royal Caribbean or Celebrity. 2 of the times there was dancing. Not singing and dancing, just dancing.

Yeah.

And it was 6 people dancing. And I know some people probably enjoyed it, but we've gotten very accustomed to Royal Caribbean and Celebrity, and they have very good entertainment. And this just didn't hit it.

Yeah, and one night they played a movie in the theater.

Yeah, that was the other night.

It was one of those nights that we were in a port much longer, but still there was no reason to get back on the ship early.

Yeah, they didn't make us want to leave port. Another— so we got on here because of the casino, and there's an interesting casino cashless system.

Yeah.

Where, you know, we're very used to like cashing out. You get a TITO or a ticket in, ticket out kind of slip that you can then go to another machine, go to another machine. And take it to the cashier at any time if you wanted to. Well, with this, once you— once we put our money in, um, you don't get your money back. It just stays on your card.

Yeah, which is great for the casino because it's easy to spend it that way.

It is.

It's bad for you if you're wanting to maybe, like, if you've won $100 and want to take that back and just play on whatever else you brought down.

Yeah.

So we did notice that was like, ooh, that was an interesting one. The other piece we were trying on this cruise that we weren't able to do with that system is we were kind of playing together most of the time.

Yeah.

So we couldn't switch cards easily. So we ended up having to look at that throughout the week as we went on too.

Um, another— the buffet. I, I thought that the food was fine.

Yeah.

The format is extremely slow.

It's ridiculous.

Yeah, it is. Most of the items are not self-serve, but there is some self-serve mixed in with them serving you. And I don't feel like the format works the greatest where like— our worst incident was tacos.

Yeah.

We went to get tacos. 2 tacos.

It shouldn't be hard to do tacos.

But they had this nacho bar in the middle of it.

Yeah.

And then it just— it took a very long time for them to heat up shells. They didn't have half the meat. And then to get over to the salsa station and everybody's just standing there waiting for items that were not being replenished. So we, we struggled and that That's just one incident.

And that happened at multiple stations.

It did.

The line, they'd have the line and then mixed in with stuff you could grab on your own. It just didn't make a whole lot of sense. And I understand kind of the reason behind having someone serve you through a buffet, but it just was not an easy process.

Yeah, I think in theory it's more of these like things are going to be warmer, fresher, but they still aren't because you end up waiting for other pieces of it.

Yeah.

So it just didn't work for us. Mostly at the bars, We felt like it seemed understaffed.

Yeah, there were many times that it felt— and I think, well, there's 2 pieces to this.

There's 2 pieces.

Yeah, I can't tell if it's the process, because then every single time you hand them your card, whether you have the drink package or not, you have to sign a receipt, which I understand when you're paying for it. When you have the drink package, I don't understand, mainly because on Royal and Celebrity, when we've had it, we hand them our card, they know us by name. Sometimes we don't even hand them their card, and But no, this is a long process. It almost feels like they don't want you to keep ordering or stay at the same bar. We ran into that at a couple places where you sign it and then they don't come back for you. And I can't tell if that's because it takes so long to give you your drinks or if they're simply because there's only one person behind the bar.

Right. And well, that's the thing for me is about the staffing. I feel like sometimes there'd be one person, whereas on other cruise ships we'd be pretty used to there being 2 to 3 people in, in that spot. Um, but even just getting 2 beers, we're not talking mixed drinks all the time. Yeah, 2 beers could take you 10 minutes because it's such a slow process where they're printing off all the, all of the receipts, waiting on people to sign for them. I'm sure part of it is they're trying to push for additional tips that way, but there's— or slow people down. I don't know, it just was inconvenient.

I thought very inconvenient. There's no way to track how many drinks you've had, at least on Royal Caribbean and Celebrity, even though there's no limit to how many drinks you can have a day. You can go in your app and see where you've charged a drink to.

Which typically it doesn't matter.

No.

But on Holland America, and I believe this is with Carnival as well, and Princess, where you're limited to 15 drinks a day, a lot of times that includes your specialty coffees, your sodas, your water even. Waters. Yeah, so we wanted to have an idea and we couldn't find anywhere on the app or on the receipt to be able to tell us, hey, you're getting close, we should probably not order that water here or something like that.

The other one for us, the shower is amazing, the toilet is ridiculous.

Yes.

It's slanted, your knees are hitting no matter how short or tall you are every time you sit down, and it's just inconvenient.

It's at a very awkward angle that forces your knees into the shower.

Yep.

And so you either end up sitting cockeyed on it or you have to like just bump your knees against the glass shower.

Yeah, it's ridiculous.

And on another note—

Where's the soft-serve ice cream?

Yeah.

Please! You don't even have to serve— you don't even have to let me serve it myself. You could stand there and just hand me a nice frozen cone of ice cream. But no, we could not find any soft-serve ice cream. They only had 2 options in the buffet, and again, the line was ridiculous to just get scoop ice cream.

I saw a soft-serve ice cream machine behind the dessert counter there. They never used it. I never saw them using it and giving cones out. Instead, it was all Scoop stuff, which we're okay with scoop ice cream, but it was a very slow process. Again, it was up in the buffet. Nothing was moving fast.

And people have it figured out on other ships. So come on, guys, learn something from everybody else.

All right, on that note, we did have a great time on Holland America. We are gonna have a whole bunch of different videos showcasing our time here on Holland. So please make sure to check out those videos if you're interested. If you're enjoying our videos, don't forget to hit that like and subscribe.

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Later.