I didn’t know Janet when she went to college, but she tells me she led a pretty dull life. Her idea of a wild Friday night was ordering a pizza and curling up in her dorm room to watch The Love Boat. With a Coke. That’s what she tells me, anyway. I’m not so sure those Friday nights were quite as pedestrian as she likes to depict, but I do know The Love Boat was one of her favorite shows. The standard itinerary during the early years of the show had Captain Stubbing navigating the Pacific Princess on a Mexican Riviera run, and Janet was particularly taken with the exotic ports — Cabo San Lucas, Puerto Vallarta, Mazatlán. When we decided to spend Christmas with our kids in San Diego, we decided to indulge ourselves in a weeklong Mexican Riviera cruise so Janet could finally see those ports for herself. The Love Boat is long gone, but Holland America’s Oosterdam was a worthy stand-in.

By the Numbers

The Ship and the Crowd

Our cruise was aboard the Oosterdam, one of Holland America’s Vista class ships with a capacity of just under 1,900 passengers. It was a welcome change after our recent run of megaships large enough to require their own zip code. One of the first things Janet and I do after boarding any ship is spend an hour or two exploring what’s on offer. I found Oosterdam well laid out, with public areas on the three uppermost decks and the three lowest passenger decks, with all the decks between devoted to cabins. The result is a clear sense of where things are without the disorientation that comes with ships carrying six thousand passengers across twenty decks of layered venues.

Holland America has a long-standing reputation as the cruise line for geriatrics. The reputation isn’t entirely unfair — their marketing targets an older demographic, and the general pace and character of the experience reflects that. But we found plenty of passengers our age and younger on this sailing, probably because it was a holiday cruise with family groups in the mix. I counted a handful of scooters, wheelchairs, and oxygen bottles, which tracks with our prior Holland America experience out of New York and Baltimore. For travelers who want a quieter, more substantive onboard experience than the megaship model offers, Holland America’s demographic is a feature rather than a liability.

The staff was, from the first hour, exceptional. Attentive, polished, and genuinely engaged in the way that “white glove service” is supposed to mean rather than just what it’s called. The hotel and kitchen teams were composed largely of Filipino and Indonesian professionals with deep hospitality backgrounds, and the service standard they maintained for the entire week was comparable to what Janet and I experienced on the QM2 — which, in the mainstream market, is about the highest compliment I know how to pay.

Entertainment and Public Areas

The Main Theater and Smaller Venues

Oosterdam’s main theater spans three decks and offers the standard array of cruise ship entertainment — a magician, a tribute band (Beatles on our sailing), and the usual music and dance revues. Since Janet and I have seen most categories of main theater production that cruise lines put on, we gravitated toward the smaller venues, where the real distinction lies. Other passengers we spoke to commented positively on the main theater shows, so they don’t miss by any measure we can independently evaluate.

Billboard Onboard

Adjacent to the casino on Deck 2 is Billboard Onboard — a piano bar with two pianists facing each other in the Howl at the Moon format, playing chart-topping hits from five decades of Billboard history. On most cruise ships, a piano bar is pleasant background music. Billboard Onboard turns it into a proper evening. Trivia questions run on screens between sets, pulling the audience into the show. By mid-cruise there was standing room only; by the last night the crowd was memorably good. Billboard Onboard remains one of HAL’s most consistent entertainment wins across the fleet.

Lincoln Center Stage and the Rolling Stone Lounge

The entertainment experience that made the deepest impression on our sailing was Lincoln Center Stage — a Holland America exclusive featuring classically trained musicians in a dedicated intimate recital space. On our cruise, four string players and a pianist performed themed programs nightly ranging from Bach to Bernstein, with just about every genre of serious music in between. They were among the most talented musicians we’ve encountered on any ship. After their first performance the venue was standing room only; by the end of the cruise passengers were arriving an hour early for front-row seats. The Q&A session they held near the end of the voyage revealed they had only begun rehearsing as a group the previous month. I am not sure whether that makes what they accomplished more impressive or more unsettling. Both.

I should be honest about the current state of this program, because it has changed. Holland America has moved Lincoln Center away from its dedicated on-ship venue model. The classically trained ensemble now travels between ships and performs on the main stage during select sailings rather than every evening in the intimate room that defined the experience when we sailed. The dedicated space on Vista-class ships like Oosterdam has been converted to other uses. This was a controversial decision internally and among HAL’s loyal passenger base — the intimacy of the small room was precisely the point — and I share the reservations. What replaced B.B. King’s Blues Club in the Queen’s Lounge space is the Rolling Stone Lounge, a seven-piece band playing rock, pop, and R&B live six nights a week. By all accounts it’s a strong program. It isn’t what it replaced, but few things are.

The Culinary Arts Center (America’s Test Kitchen)

This is the feature that surprised me most — and given that I’ve been cooking seriously for most of my adult life, the surprise was itself a surprise. Holland America teamed up with Food & Wine Magazine years ago to offer the first at-sea Culinary Arts Center, also known as America’s Test Kitchen. On Oosterdam it occupies a dedicated space on Deck 2, tiered stadium seating around a full working demonstration kitchen, with a resident chef offering instructional classes throughout the cruise on everything from vegetarian cooking to the proper way to handle fish.

I attended the salmon class. I make a mean salmon dish and have for years. Or so I thought. The class disabused me of that notion in about forty minutes. What I had been doing to salmon was apparently not the proper technique for cooking salmon. What I had been doing was the proper technique for cooking something else, I suppose — I don’t know what. The first dish I cooked when we got home was salmon, applying everything I learned in the class. The difference was immediate and significant. I am still annoyed that I didn’t attend more sessions. If you book Holland America and walk past the Culinary Arts Center without stopping, you are making an error of the same category.

The space converts throughout the day: the wheeled kitchen carts roll out to transform the room into the Queen’s Lounge during the day and, on our sailing, B.B. King’s Blues Club at night. It also contains, as far as we could determine, the only real dance floor on the ship — a fact that Janet noted with some frequency.

The Ocean Bar, Promenade, and Other Spaces

The Ocean Bar on Deck 3 is one of Janet’s and my favorite recurring spots on Holland America ships, and this cruise was no different. They offered specialty seasonal cocktails — it was Christmas week, so the candy cane martini made an appearance, with crushed candy canes rimming the glass. Janet loved them enough that happy hour became a fixed part of our daily schedule. Holland America’s two-for-one happy hour is a genuine value in an environment where drink pricing has become an increasingly fraught topic across the industry.

The promenade deck is worth mentioning because it is increasingly rare. On megaships, a true walking promenade is often sacrificed to hull space for tender bays, shore excursion facilities, or extra cabin decks. Oosterdam has one, and we used it after dinner every night. We told ourselves it was offsetting the calories from dinner. This was not true, but it was a pleasant fiction. The Crow’s Nest lounge on Deck 10 offers panoramic sea views and serves as one of the best quiet perches on the ship, particularly during sea days when the lighting is right. The Explorations Café adjacent to it is where you want to be for a morning coffee and the day’s first uninterrupted hour of reading.

Dining

The Vista Dining Room

A single main dining room, two stories, designed to minimize noise and keep the intimacy of smaller tables intact. Holland America is one of the few mass-market lines that still offers sommelier service in the main dining room — ours was knowledgeable and genuinely helpful without the upsell pressure that characterizes most cruise ship sommelier interactions. Tables run from two to twelve; the smaller tables are grouped together and the larger ones placed in a separate portion of the room, which effectively insulates you from the energy of a nearby party of ten that is enthusiastically working through the cocktail menu. I have had the opposite experience on other ships and it is not a pleasant evening. Menus changed nightly. The food was quite good if not particularly inventive.

HAL has moved to a three-course format from the traditional five or six: a combined soup/salad/appetizer course, an entrée, and a dessert. You can still order multiples within each course, and the kitchen will send out samplers of dishes you’re uncertain about. The dress standard in the main dining room was country club casual with one or two formal nights — treated more as a suggestion than a requirement in practice. I didn’t see tuxedos, but I also didn’t see shorts, jeans, or t-shirts. There is a middle ground on a cruise ship, and Oosterdam’s passengers found it.

Lido Marketplace and Casual Options

The Lido Marketplace buffet on Deck 9 is several cuts above the buffet standard you encounter on mass-market ships. Breakfast includes an egg station cooking to order alongside frittatas, quiches, smoked salmon with proper accompaniments — bagels, cream cheese, capers, onions — and a full bread bar. Lunch features a made-to-order salad bar (a sensible approach; self-serve communal salad bars are one of the primary transmission vectors for norovirus at sea), a pasta station with a chef building your sauce from scratch, and a sushi bar operating made-to-order. The pre-made pasta of the day tends to dry out — ask before you take it. The pizza is unremarkable cruise ship pizza. The sushi and the pasta stations are not.

The Dive In next to the main pool does made-to-order burgers and hot dogs with some genuinely creative topping options, plus a self-serve taco station that became one of my most-visited lunch destinations. For a ship that doesn’t position itself as a foodie destination, Oosterdam was producing genuinely good casual food.

Specialty Dining

The Pinnacle Grill is Holland America’s signature specialty restaurant, and at $35 per person for dinner it represents reasonable value if the main dining room isn’t meeting your expectations on a given night. A $15 lunch option is available for those who want to try it at lower commitment. Once per cruise the Pinnacle converts to Rudi’s Sel de Mer — a pop-up seafood restaurant with a menu built around exactly that. The second specialty option, Canaletto, is Italian-themed at $15 per person. We skipped both — the main dining room was performing well enough that we didn’t feel deprived — but they are there for the evening when you want something different.

The Thermal Suite and Spa

Holland America limits Thermal Suite access to 35 passengers for the duration of the cruise — a sensible policy that keeps the hydrotherapy pool and sauna genuinely relaxing rather than merely wet and crowded. Additional access is available on port days through day passes bundled with spa services. The hydrotherapy pool is configured with horizontal rails shaped like a chaise longue, allowing you to remain submerged while positioned to maximize the effect of the jets. The Thermal Suite offers a sauna and a heated tile lounge room with an ocean view. The tile chairs were designed for lingering. Our one criticism was a shortage of actual lounge chairs in both areas, which tended to limit how long you stayed — standing next to a heated tile chaise waiting for someone to finish is not the same as being in one. At $149 per person or $249 per couple for the sailing, we got our money’s worth but only just.

The Cabins

Oosterdam offers 29 cabin categories, from 151-square-foot inside cabins up to a 1,150-square-foot Pinnacle Penthouse Suite. We booked an aft-facing balcony, which came with pleasures and inconveniences in roughly equal measure. The cabin itself was well-appointed and surprisingly quiet for most of the day. Storage in the closets was ample; drawer storage was less so, which is the standard Holland America trade-off and something to plan around if you pack for the full five-day weather range. The 50-inch flat screen contributed to the sense of space — a small upgrade that matters more than it probably should.

The aft-balcony tradeoffs are worth knowing before you book. The balcony came with full-sized chaise lounges, which is not standard across the fleet and which Janet considered a decisive upgrade. On the negative side, we were one deck below the aft pool and heard deck chairs being moved starting around 4am when the kitchen staff prepared for the morning service in the al fresco dining area. It lasted fifteen minutes and we went back to sleep, but it was consistent throughout the cruise. The other aft-cabin reality: cigarette smoke occasionally drifted down from the smoking section of the pool deck above. Not constant, but present. If either of these is a dealbreaker, book forward or mid-ship.

What Disappointed Us

The honest answer is: not much. But I said I’d be honest, so here it is.

Oosterdam entered service in 2003, and despite a 2017 dry dock, she showed her age in the public areas when we sailed — wear that a 2017 refurbishment should have addressed and didn’t fully. The 2025 dry dock has addressed more of it, and the planned 2027 Evolution renovation will be the most comprehensive update in the ship’s history. More on that below. For now, the ship is aging but not neglected.

The dance floor situation genuinely frustrated us. On previous Holland America sailings, the Ocean Bar offered live music and a proper dance floor where Janet and I could foxtrot or waltz our way through an evening. On this cruise the Ocean Bar had been reconfigured to add seating, and the dance floor was gone — apparently a casualty of the refurbishment. B.B. King’s Blues Club had a decent floor but the blues format doesn’t lend itself to what we were looking for. For a line that built its reputation in part on live music and dancing, losing a dedicated ballroom dance space on a ship without a replacement is a genuine miss.

The technology situation deserves its own paragraph because it was, on our sailing, genuinely bad — and because it has since been fixed in a way that makes noting the old problem and the resolution equally useful. HAL’s internet at the time of our cruise ran on a minute-based package system that required logging out through a specific process to stop the billing clock, failed to properly log out across multiple devices, offered inadequate bandwidth, and delivered spotty reception that cost me the better part of the Navy-UVA Military Bowl during a moment when the Midshipmen were putting significant points on the board. I take this kind of thing personally.

Looking Ahead: Holland America Evolution

Oosterdam is scheduled to lead Holland America’s most ambitious refurbishment program in the line’s history. The Holland America Evolution project, announced for fall 2027, will put the ship through a bow-to-stern renovation representing part of a $500 million fleet-wide investment. The specific planned additions to Oosterdam include the Grand Dutch Café — an all-day European café concept previously available only on the line’s newer Pinnacle-class ships — near the atrium on Deck 3; 76 new staterooms including 30 solo verandah cabins; a reimagined Pinnacle Suite expanding to 1,550 square feet; and 24 new Vista Suites with panoramic ocean views. The ship will also receive technical upgrades focused on energy efficiency and system reliability.