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Holland America Line

MS Rotterdam (VI)

Your Rating:
Reviewed by:Gaitan Arsenault
# previous cruises: 3
Date of Trip: September 30, 2001
Itinerary: Mediterranean

From start to finish it has been a wonderful silver wedding cruise. The Rotterdam VI is a floating masterpiece, sliding canopy over the pool deck, crew service excellent and top quality food. Holland America is a very professional company. We've been taken in charge from Barcelona airport to Venice airport. If you don't have a direct flight to your embarkation port we do recommend that you spend one night at arrival city. You'll recover faster from the time lag and most of all if your luggage does not follow (this happened to us) you'll have one more day to recover them before embarkation.

Public areas are numerous and of various thematic. You can find easily a place to seat in intimacy. The ship is not overcrowded although we sailed 2 weeks after sept 11th and the ship was booked at 85% capacity. Even being booked at 100% this ship wouldn't be crowded. The walk around promenade is beautiful and all teak wood. Chairs on the promenade deck are wood made and fabric cushioned. No problem to find vacant ones. The Queens lounge theater is a masterpiece design and the night shows are professional. There are fresh flowers all over public areas. The Odyssey restaurant on reservation is wonderful for intimate diner.

Food and service excellent and outstanding. Lido buffet restaurant is great in quality and diversity. The service at Odyssey restaurant was a four star one.There is a chord orchestra every night at diner time in the La Fontaine main dinning room. At the end of the cruise we've been given a bundle of all the diner menus. At every port of call there was a thematic dinner serving us typical food of the places we visited. On Canada Thanksgiving day we had a dinner with canadian typical food and canadian flags on each table.

We had a mini suite on Verandah deck. Well enough closet space. We could even hide the luggage bags under the bed. We heard absolutely no noise from nearby cabins. The only negative side was at check-in where we found under the bed remains of an apple and plastic wrapper. So the housekeeping staff should pay attention to check under the beds. During the cruise, the housekeeping was perfect.Bath room was large enough and included a jaccuzzi bath but useless since it is too small. On every deck there is a coin-operated washer-dryer room where you can do your laundry.

Theater shows were of american musical comedy performed by a professional cast. Cruise staff were excellent and service oriented. We took the renewal of vows package. The ceremony presided by the captain was intimate and done professionally: flowers in our cabin, personal invitation, cocktail, champagne, hors-d'oeuvres, photos, wedding cake and a beautiful portfolio delivered the day after to our suite and including photos, certificate, invitation letter and free pages to include personal photos and testimony. We'll remember this cruise for the rest of our lives because we took this cruise to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary which took place on SEPTEMBER 11th, 1976.

Our itinerary sailed us from Barcelona to Monaco, Rome, Naples, Malta, Kusadasi (Turkey), Piraeus (Athens), Katakolon (Olympia) and Venice. All excursions were very well organized and on time. We had excellent local touristic guides. We had a private visit of the Vatican museums after normal opening hours. The only port of call where we had to use the ship tender service was Monaco. The tender service was fast despite the number of passengers. No hassle.

At 49, we were in the lower age group. There were almost no kids on that cruise. Most of our fellow passengers were American although there were many canadians, I'd say about 75% Americans and 25% Canadians. We had great time together and exchange e-mail addresses.