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| HOLLAND AMERICA |
| NOORDAM |
| NOORDAM |
While the captain retains overall
responsibility for all that happens on a
ship and is the most visible
representative of the cruise line, the
person who is most directly responsible
for whether passengers have a good
cruise is the hotel manager. He or she is
responsible inter alia for the
accommodations, the service, the food,
the entertainment, the onboard activities
and the shore excursions. This is
normally the largest department on a
cruise ship and because these functions
are critical to the ship’s success, the
hotel manager is a senior position
reporting directly to the captain.
In the days when transporting
passengers was just a sideline to a ship’s
main business of carrying cargo and/or
the mails, the responsibility for taking
care of the passengers often fell to the
ship’s purser. This remained so even
when the focus shifted to carrying
passengers in the days of the great
liners. Often the purser would have
started out with an entry level position at
sea and worked his way up through the
shipboard organization. Today,
however, the hotel manager is typically a
graduate of a university level hotel school
with his or her prior experience often
being with a major hotel chain rather
than at sea.
Henk Mensink is one of this new bred
of cruise ship hotel managers. In 1988,
Mensink graduated from hotel school in
The Hague in the Netherlands and then
took a position with the Ritz Carlton
Hotel Company in Boston. However,
he had long been interested in working
on cruise ships - - partially inspired by
watching episodes of the television series
“The Love Boat” - - and so he joined
Holland America Line in 1994 as a
Food and Beverage Manager. In 2001,
he became a hotel manager and has
done five world cruises or as HAL calls
them “Grand World Voyages”. When I
spoke with him, Mensink was hotel
manager of Holland America’s latest
Vista-class ship NOORDAM.
The service on the NOORDAM is
very good with friendly restaurant
managers, waiters, stewards and
bartenders who are eager to please.
Achieving and maintaining an “at-your-
service” attitude is one of Mensink’s
primary objectives. “You motivate staff
predominantly by creating an
environment that makes them feel at
home. If somebody comes to me and
says somebody passed away at home,
what do you do? Do you say: ‘Tough
luck; that is your problem?’ Or, do you
do something as a company and initially,
as a department or as a manager? We
create an environment where you say we
care, we care about you, we care about
your emotions. Even if it is the most
expensive time of the year, we are going
to get you home with your family and we
work on that. And, that spreads like
wildfire. People know it. People know
there is care.”
“Simple things like crew parties, raffles,
bingo [are important] but also finding
time to train, finding time to recognize
them, to be polite and courteous to them
and treat them like you wish to be
treated yourself. Create something that
will make our staff want to do a job
rather than having to do a job.”
A good attitude alone will not create a
good restaurant or a good floating
resort. Accordingly, HAL invests
heavily in training the staff. “We have a
training school in Indonesia which is a
hotel school. It houses about two
hundred students, so it is fairly large.
We train them for entry level restaurant
and entry level housekeeping positions.
We also have training for our beverage
department and for the front office and
for the culinary department, which takes
place in Manila in the Philippines. They
come aboard the ships and start at the
entry level positions and progress up
through the organization. Besides
practical experience, there is also training
before one actually gets accepted into
staff. [Final acceptance is] based on
merit - - actually being able to do the
job, not only knowing it, but actually
doing it.”
The majority of the hotel staff on the
HAL ships are Indonesian or Filipinos -
- from nations where, according to the
media, there is a lot of resentment
against HAL’s primary customer base,
Americans. “That is bad publicity. I
think with much of news there is
sometimes a tendency to overdo it and
stereotype an entire nation because of
20 or 60 or 100 people that are off the
rock. That is a pity for them because
they have to work twice as hard to make
up for the belief that is ingrained in the
people’s mind before they have even
met.”
While the majority of passengers are
Americans, the particular market
NOORDAM appeals to “depends upon
the season we are sailing in. When we
are in Alaska, obviously, it is a different
market from when we are sailing from
New York on a ten or eleven day
cruise. The market that we seem to be
attracting the most, although we are not
specifically aiming for that, is the market
from the New York area, New Jersey
and the northeast part of the U.S.
Guests don’t have to travel far. Either
they take a bus or luxury limos and such,
they don’t have to fly, don’t have to
worry about luggage. They know the
luggage is all going to be here. They don’
t have to careful about how much
weight there is in the luggage. It seems
to be our market for this run.”
“The Christmas cruise and the New
Year’s cruise are slightly different than
our average. We do have more families
onboard. Last one we had 300 children
aboard. We now have 200 which is not
normal for our regular sailings throughout
the year. It is usually about 10 or 20.
So there is quite a big difference.”
When the ship was cruising the
Mediterranean in the summer of 2006,
“around 20 percent of our guests were
European.” When there is a shift in the
mix of nationalities onboard, there is “not
so much a different use of the facilities
onboard, but certainly there is a different
appreciation level of what we do.” At
the end of each cruise, passengers are
asked to fill out questionnaires and
comment on the cruise. When there are
more Europeans or Canadians on a
cruise, the numerical scores that the ship
receives are less than when there are
more Americans onboard. “To our
corporate offices, it sometimes seems
like we are not doing what we are
supposed to be doing in terms of
numbers and that is probably true, but in
terms of satisfaction, the appreciation
and the comments that you read show
the opposite is certainly true.”
responsibility for all that happens on a
ship and is the most visible
representative of the cruise line, the
person who is most directly responsible
for whether passengers have a good
cruise is the hotel manager. He or she is
responsible inter alia for the
accommodations, the service, the food,
the entertainment, the onboard activities
and the shore excursions. This is
normally the largest department on a
cruise ship and because these functions
are critical to the ship’s success, the
hotel manager is a senior position
reporting directly to the captain.
In the days when transporting
passengers was just a sideline to a ship’s
main business of carrying cargo and/or
the mails, the responsibility for taking
care of the passengers often fell to the
ship’s purser. This remained so even
when the focus shifted to carrying
passengers in the days of the great
liners. Often the purser would have
started out with an entry level position at
sea and worked his way up through the
shipboard organization. Today,
however, the hotel manager is typically a
graduate of a university level hotel school
with his or her prior experience often
being with a major hotel chain rather
than at sea.
Henk Mensink is one of this new bred
of cruise ship hotel managers. In 1988,
Mensink graduated from hotel school in
The Hague in the Netherlands and then
took a position with the Ritz Carlton
Hotel Company in Boston. However,
he had long been interested in working
on cruise ships - - partially inspired by
watching episodes of the television series
“The Love Boat” - - and so he joined
Holland America Line in 1994 as a
Food and Beverage Manager. In 2001,
he became a hotel manager and has
done five world cruises or as HAL calls
them “Grand World Voyages”. When I
spoke with him, Mensink was hotel
manager of Holland America’s latest
Vista-class ship NOORDAM.
The service on the NOORDAM is
very good with friendly restaurant
managers, waiters, stewards and
bartenders who are eager to please.
Achieving and maintaining an “at-your-
service” attitude is one of Mensink’s
primary objectives. “You motivate staff
predominantly by creating an
environment that makes them feel at
home. If somebody comes to me and
says somebody passed away at home,
what do you do? Do you say: ‘Tough
luck; that is your problem?’ Or, do you
do something as a company and initially,
as a department or as a manager? We
create an environment where you say we
care, we care about you, we care about
your emotions. Even if it is the most
expensive time of the year, we are going
to get you home with your family and we
work on that. And, that spreads like
wildfire. People know it. People know
there is care.”
“Simple things like crew parties, raffles,
bingo [are important] but also finding
time to train, finding time to recognize
them, to be polite and courteous to them
and treat them like you wish to be
treated yourself. Create something that
will make our staff want to do a job
rather than having to do a job.”
A good attitude alone will not create a
good restaurant or a good floating
resort. Accordingly, HAL invests
heavily in training the staff. “We have a
training school in Indonesia which is a
hotel school. It houses about two
hundred students, so it is fairly large.
We train them for entry level restaurant
and entry level housekeeping positions.
We also have training for our beverage
department and for the front office and
for the culinary department, which takes
place in Manila in the Philippines. They
come aboard the ships and start at the
entry level positions and progress up
through the organization. Besides
practical experience, there is also training
before one actually gets accepted into
staff. [Final acceptance is] based on
merit - - actually being able to do the
job, not only knowing it, but actually
doing it.”
The majority of the hotel staff on the
HAL ships are Indonesian or Filipinos -
- from nations where, according to the
media, there is a lot of resentment
against HAL’s primary customer base,
Americans. “That is bad publicity. I
think with much of news there is
sometimes a tendency to overdo it and
stereotype an entire nation because of
20 or 60 or 100 people that are off the
rock. That is a pity for them because
they have to work twice as hard to make
up for the belief that is ingrained in the
people’s mind before they have even
met.”
While the majority of passengers are
Americans, the particular market
NOORDAM appeals to “depends upon
the season we are sailing in. When we
are in Alaska, obviously, it is a different
market from when we are sailing from
New York on a ten or eleven day
cruise. The market that we seem to be
attracting the most, although we are not
specifically aiming for that, is the market
from the New York area, New Jersey
and the northeast part of the U.S.
Guests don’t have to travel far. Either
they take a bus or luxury limos and such,
they don’t have to fly, don’t have to
worry about luggage. They know the
luggage is all going to be here. They don’
t have to careful about how much
weight there is in the luggage. It seems
to be our market for this run.”
“The Christmas cruise and the New
Year’s cruise are slightly different than
our average. We do have more families
onboard. Last one we had 300 children
aboard. We now have 200 which is not
normal for our regular sailings throughout
the year. It is usually about 10 or 20.
So there is quite a big difference.”
When the ship was cruising the
Mediterranean in the summer of 2006,
“around 20 percent of our guests were
European.” When there is a shift in the
mix of nationalities onboard, there is “not
so much a different use of the facilities
onboard, but certainly there is a different
appreciation level of what we do.” At
the end of each cruise, passengers are
asked to fill out questionnaires and
comment on the cruise. When there are
more Europeans or Canadians on a
cruise, the numerical scores that the ship
receives are less than when there are
more Americans onboard. “To our
corporate offices, it sometimes seems
like we are not doing what we are
supposed to be doing in terms of
numbers and that is probably true, but in
terms of satisfaction, the appreciation
and the comments that you read show
the opposite is certainly true.”
Holland America currently operates
four classes of ships. There is the R-
class, which are approximately 61,000
gross tons and include the flagships
ROTTERDAM and AMSTERDAM,
the 55,000 gross ton S-class ships, the
one-of-a-kind PRINSENDAM and the
four largest and newest ships, the Vista-
class (88,000 gross tons) which includes
the NOORDAM. “We have been able
to attract a different market, a younger
market, on the Vista ships as opposed to
the other classes. The pace of the Vista
ships seems to be a little bit faster, which
attracts a younger crowd. Guests who
are a little older have to walk further [in
the Vista ships and] that is one of the
issues. If you look at the layout of the
ships, you pretty much can’t go through
any of the public areas without being in
some sort of a revenue-associated event
or an entertainment-type event. There
are [fewer] quiet-time, quiet-spaces in
these ships and that is what an older
generation looks for. Our traditional
Mariner [i.e. HAL’s repeat passenger
association] crowds appreciate that
more and like the mid-size and smaller
ships in our range better in general than
the Vista ships.”
Even though the different classes of
HAL ships attract different markets,
HAL does not market its particular
ships. In contrast to lines such as
Cunard where the particular ship is
emphasized in the marketing of the
cruise, HAL emphasizes that it is a
Holland America cruise with relatively
little mention of the particular ship.
“With Cunard you have ships that are in
a class in and of themselves. We market
seasons, itineraries, destinations, and
departure ports for convenience
purposes but not specifically a ship like
the NOORDAM.” This is because
HAL has a practice of upgrading its
existing fleet so that all of its ships have
the same amenities as its newer ships.
As a result, “other than the ship’s size,
you don’t find that many different
features. When the Vista ships came out
you couldn’t find a Greenhouse spa on
an R class or an S class. Now you do
because we have upgraded the ships and
you find the same things in a smaller
scale. That then leaves you with itinerary
and it leaves you with the size of the
ship.”
In addition to upgrading amenities,
HAL is continually adjusting its practices
to meet competition and to meet the
desires of its clientele. For example, in
the wake of Norwegian Cruise Line’s
implementation of “Freestyle dining” in
which passengers can chose when and
where they want to dine, several of the
cruise lines have sought to add more
flexibility to their dining practices.
“Mariners told us that they would like to
eat a little earlier and would like to have
a window during which they could come
down to the dining room. Then you
have the other clientele that would like to
not be restricted to one time at the later
seating.” Accordingly, HAL has
introduced a program whereby
passengers can arrive between 5:30 and
6 for the early seating in the dining room
and between 8 and 9 for the late
seating. “We should be careful not to
say that it is Freestyle dining because it
isn’t, it is still according to the dining
room assignment and table assignment.
It is just the arrival time that gives you
the flexibility.”
Holland America is a subsidiary of
Carnival Corporation. However, while
there is communication at the senior level
between the parent company and the
subsidiaries, there is little or no contact
between the ships of the different
companies. “We all have our own
branding, if you will, and we retain a
certain following and position.”
Accordingly, although the subsidiaries
utilize the parent’s purchasing power and
expertise, the supplies purchased for one
line are not necessarily the same as for
another. “For instance, our chicken
breast is not the same chicken breast as
it is on Carnival [Cruise Lines]. We do
a lot of product specification.”
HAL’s efforts appear to be
succeeding. There are now 13 ships in
the fleet with a new one, the
EURODAM (86,000 gross tons)
scheduled to go into service in the
summer of 2008. “Across the fleet, I
think the average occupancy is 98.3
percent. The average works out to
about lower berth capacity. But there
are some cruises, such as [holiday
cruises], where we sail at 110 or 112
percent occupancy.” (More than 100
percent occupancy is achieved by the
use of upper berths, cribs etc). Even on
those cruises where there are a couple of
empty cabins, “for all intents and
purposes you could say we are full.
There is always something that happens
which requires you to use another cabin
for whatever reason such as a marital
disagreement.”
four classes of ships. There is the R-
class, which are approximately 61,000
gross tons and include the flagships
ROTTERDAM and AMSTERDAM,
the 55,000 gross ton S-class ships, the
one-of-a-kind PRINSENDAM and the
four largest and newest ships, the Vista-
class (88,000 gross tons) which includes
the NOORDAM. “We have been able
to attract a different market, a younger
market, on the Vista ships as opposed to
the other classes. The pace of the Vista
ships seems to be a little bit faster, which
attracts a younger crowd. Guests who
are a little older have to walk further [in
the Vista ships and] that is one of the
issues. If you look at the layout of the
ships, you pretty much can’t go through
any of the public areas without being in
some sort of a revenue-associated event
or an entertainment-type event. There
are [fewer] quiet-time, quiet-spaces in
these ships and that is what an older
generation looks for. Our traditional
Mariner [i.e. HAL’s repeat passenger
association] crowds appreciate that
more and like the mid-size and smaller
ships in our range better in general than
the Vista ships.”
Even though the different classes of
HAL ships attract different markets,
HAL does not market its particular
ships. In contrast to lines such as
Cunard where the particular ship is
emphasized in the marketing of the
cruise, HAL emphasizes that it is a
Holland America cruise with relatively
little mention of the particular ship.
“With Cunard you have ships that are in
a class in and of themselves. We market
seasons, itineraries, destinations, and
departure ports for convenience
purposes but not specifically a ship like
the NOORDAM.” This is because
HAL has a practice of upgrading its
existing fleet so that all of its ships have
the same amenities as its newer ships.
As a result, “other than the ship’s size,
you don’t find that many different
features. When the Vista ships came out
you couldn’t find a Greenhouse spa on
an R class or an S class. Now you do
because we have upgraded the ships and
you find the same things in a smaller
scale. That then leaves you with itinerary
and it leaves you with the size of the
ship.”
In addition to upgrading amenities,
HAL is continually adjusting its practices
to meet competition and to meet the
desires of its clientele. For example, in
the wake of Norwegian Cruise Line’s
implementation of “Freestyle dining” in
which passengers can chose when and
where they want to dine, several of the
cruise lines have sought to add more
flexibility to their dining practices.
“Mariners told us that they would like to
eat a little earlier and would like to have
a window during which they could come
down to the dining room. Then you
have the other clientele that would like to
not be restricted to one time at the later
seating.” Accordingly, HAL has
introduced a program whereby
passengers can arrive between 5:30 and
6 for the early seating in the dining room
and between 8 and 9 for the late
seating. “We should be careful not to
say that it is Freestyle dining because it
isn’t, it is still according to the dining
room assignment and table assignment.
It is just the arrival time that gives you
the flexibility.”
Holland America is a subsidiary of
Carnival Corporation. However, while
there is communication at the senior level
between the parent company and the
subsidiaries, there is little or no contact
between the ships of the different
companies. “We all have our own
branding, if you will, and we retain a
certain following and position.”
Accordingly, although the subsidiaries
utilize the parent’s purchasing power and
expertise, the supplies purchased for one
line are not necessarily the same as for
another. “For instance, our chicken
breast is not the same chicken breast as
it is on Carnival [Cruise Lines]. We do
a lot of product specification.”
HAL’s efforts appear to be
succeeding. There are now 13 ships in
the fleet with a new one, the
EURODAM (86,000 gross tons)
scheduled to go into service in the
summer of 2008. “Across the fleet, I
think the average occupancy is 98.3
percent. The average works out to
about lower berth capacity. But there
are some cruises, such as [holiday
cruises], where we sail at 110 or 112
percent occupancy.” (More than 100
percent occupancy is achieved by the
use of upper berths, cribs etc). Even on
those cruises where there are a couple of
empty cabins, “for all intents and
purposes you could say we are full.
There is always something that happens
which requires you to use another cabin
for whatever reason such as a marital
disagreement.”
AN INTERVIEW
WITH
HENK MENSINK
Hotel Manager, M.S. NOORDAM
by RICHARD H. WAGNER
WITH
HENK MENSINK
Hotel Manager, M.S. NOORDAM
by RICHARD H. WAGNER
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