Westerdam

Westerdam is the third of the four Vista-class ships, launched at Fincantieri Marghera in July 2003 and christened at Venice the following April by the Dutch actress Renee Soutendijk. She is mechanically the sister of Oosterdam and Noordam (same yard, same 936-foot Panamax hull, same pair of Azipods), and she has had a more eventful career than either of them.

February 2020

On February 1, 2020, Westerdam left Hong Kong on a routine Asia sailing with more than two thousand people aboard and no confirmed illness. Over the next twelve days she was refused entry at port after port; Japan, Taiwan, Guam, the Philippines and Thailand all turned her away while she had nothing to report. Cambodia finally took her at Sihanoukville on February 13. One disembarked passenger then tested positive in Malaysia, the ship was locked down again, and everyone else was cleared and sent home by February 19.

It is the reason a lot of people know her name, and it is worth being straight about: nothing that happened was the ship’s doing, and the episode says more about February 2020 than it does about Westerdam. She went on to spend most of the next two years laid up with the rest of the fleet.

What the 2026 drydock did

She came out of two weeks at Singapore in January 2026 with a reworked Crow’s Nest, the forward observation lounge that is the best room on any Vista hull, additional staterooms and refreshed public spaces. That follows a 2007 refit that added 34 cabins. She is also on the list for Holland America Evolution, the $500 million rebuild of six ships that starts with Oosterdam in 2027; her turn has not been dated.

Aboard now: the World Stage, the Rolling Stone Lounge that replaced B.B. King’s across the Vista class in 2023, Billboard Onboard at two pianos, and the Dam Band in the Ocean Bar. Dining runs to the Pinnacle Grill, Canaletto, Morimoto By Sea and Tamarind, the pan-Asian room; she and Noordam carry both of the Asian restaurants, where Oosterdam carries only Morimoto.

Where she actually sails

Two seasons and a very long trip between them. Summers she runs Alaska out of Vancouver on seven-night Inside Passage sailings, with the Denali and Yukon cruisetour packages attached at the Fairbanks end, which is why land-side departures show up in her schedule. Then, in September, she makes the thirty-four-day crossing from Seattle to Sydney by way of Hawaii and Tahiti, and spends the southern summer on fourteen- to twenty-six-night runs around Australia, New Zealand, the Coral Sea and Fiji out of Sydney and Auckland. In March she turns around and sails the crossing back.

If you want a long ocean voyage on a mid-sized ship, those Pacific crossings are the most interesting thing in her book by a distance.

Who she suits

Passengers who plan in seasons rather than weekends: the fourteen-night median sailing, the twenty-six-night Coral Sea run, the crossing. She is comfortable, uncrowded, and the food is better than the fare suggests.

She is a poor choice for families with children and a worse one for anyone who wants to be entertained by the vessel. She is also twenty-two years old and has not yet had the Evolution rebuild, so what you get is a well-maintained ship of the mid-2000s, cabins that are perfectly decent and unmistakably not new.