ss Rotterdam - A Retired Ocean Liner You Can Still Sleep On

In September 1958, Queen Juliana swung a silver axe to launch a ship built as the flagship of Holland America Line's transatlantic fleet: a 228-meter (748-foot) liner with an engineering choice that startled shipbuilders at the time – twin exhaust uptakes in place of a single funnel, which freed up the middle of the ship for a large, boxy deckhouse instead.

A year later, on her first crossing to New York, a young Crown Princess Beatrix was among the passengers on board. Over the following four decades the ship sailed under two different names, went bankrupt under her second owner, sat idle in the Bahamas for years, and was eventually towed back to Europe in stages for restoration.

Today she's moored for good on Rotterdam's waterfront, where you can book one of 254 cabins, eat in a restaurant that used to be a casino, or get locked in an escape room built into the old cold storage rooms below deck.

Docked In Rotterdam's Katendrecht District

The ship is permanently moored at the Derde Katendrechtsehoofd quay on the Nieuwe Maas river, in Rotterdam's Katendrecht neighborhood. A pontoon added in 2014 lets boats tie up right alongside, so you can walk straight onto B-Deck without circling round to the far side of the ship.

Both a water taxi and a water bus stop here, the latter continuing on to spots like Kinderdijk if you'd rather keep sightseeing by boat than by tram. It's a short walk from Hotel New York, the former Holland America Line head office that's now a hotel in its own right – reuniting two buildings tied to the same shipping line's story after decades apart.

From Transatlantic Flagship To Floating Hotel

The ship was built by the Rotterdam Drydock Company, ordered in 1955 and launched in September 1958, with her interiors handled by designer Van Tienhoven and a roster of Dutch artists. She was handed over to Holland America Line in the summer of 1959 and made her maiden Atlantic crossing that September, carrying well over a thousand passengers along with Crown Princess Beatrix. She ran the transatlantic route through the 1960s, until the rise of commercial air travel ended scheduled ocean crossings to New York in 1971.

A clever detail saved her from retirement at that point: her architects had built in a double staircase with movable partitions that let the ship split into two classes for crossings or merge into one for cruising, so she simply switched careers, spending the next couple of decades sailing the Caribbean in winter and Alaska in summer, with occasional world cruises.

By the late 1980s Carnival Corporation had taken over Holland America Line, and by 1997 new international safety rules made keeping the aging ship running expensive enough that Carnival chose to retire her instead. She was sold to the American company Premier Cruise Line, which wanted to rename her The Big Red Boat IV to match its other ships before public pushback led it to choose Rembrandt instead.

She sailed under that name out of Port Canaveral until September 2000, when Premier collapsed overnight. The ship was ordered into Halifax, placed under arrest by the local sheriff's department, and eventually towed to Freeport in the Bahamas, where she sat unused for three years.

The Rotterdam Dry Dock Company bought her in 2003 with plans to bring her home as a hotel; ownership passed in 2005 to housing corporation Woonbron, working with Albeda College, which went on to use part of the ship as a hospitality training site.

The restoration that followed took her to four ports: Gibraltar for asbestos removal, Cadiz for hull repairs and repainting in Holland America's original gray, then Gdansk in Poland and Wilhelmshaven in Germany, where hundreds of cabins were rebuilt and some of the original tapestries were rewoven from scratch.

She arrived back in Rotterdam in August 2008 and opened to the public as a hotel and museum in February 2010. WestCord Hotels, a family-run Dutch group that started out on the island of Vlieland in 1968, bought the ship in 2013 and has run it since, alongside earning it a Green Key Gold sustainability certification in 2016. She's the last Premier Cruise Line ship still afloat – her closest fleet-mate, Starship Atlantic, was scrapped in 2018.

The Club Room: A Restaurant Built Inside An Old Onboard Casino

The ship's main sit-down restaurant serves a rotating multi-course tasting menu built around seasonal, mostly Dutch ingredients, with a sommelier picking a matching wine from the Ocean Wine Bar's list for each course.

The room's own history is more colorful than most restaurants': this used to be the smoking room for tourist-class passengers, fitted with a large fireplace and artificial flames to keep things cozy on an eight-day Atlantic crossing. By the 1980s it had been converted into an onboard casino, complete with roulette tables and slot machines.

These days the walls carry tapestries by Gisèle van Waterschoot depicting scenes from Greek mythology, and the fireplace surround was designed by artist Herbert Semey around the story of the Seven Servants of Folly.

The Ocean Wine Bar: Fish-Scale Ceilings And A View Of The Skyline

A few steps from the Club Room, this wave-shaped bar is where you'd go for a glass of wine before or after dinner. The ceiling is covered in oversized fish-scale tiles, and three spiny shrimp sculptures by artist Aart van den IJssel have hung overhead since the bar opened in November 2019.

A sommelier curates the wine list, and the bar occasionally runs tasting evenings and food-and-wine pairing menus. On clear days, when the weather cooperates, it sometimes moves outside to the Lido Terrace, with the Rotterdam skyline as the backdrop either way.

The Captains Lounge: Coffee, Cocktails And A Gin Menu

Located on the Main Deck across from the hotel's reception, this small lounge is where you'd stop for a coffee and something home-baked in the morning, or a cocktail later on. It wasn't always a bar – the space used to house a shop, before being redesigned into the Captains Lounge in December 2013 by the interior design firm ESTIDA. There's a dedicated gin and tonic menu, and the lounge occasionally puts on live music evenings.

The Rooms

There are 254 rooms on board, spread across the B-Deck, A-Deck and Lower Promenade Deck, with the more spacious suites kept up on the Boat Deck and Sun Deck. Every room is decorated in one of three styles – Original, Manhattan or Bahamas – each based on a destination the ship visited during her years as a cruise liner.

Categories run from Standard Single and Standard Double rooms up through Superior and Deluxe rooms, plus two family-sized layouts built for four adults and a child or two adults and two children.

The clearest difference between them comes down to windows: cabins on the inside of the ship, including the family rooms, don't have any at all, while rooms toward the outer hull keep their original portholes. A handful of the Superior rooms are wheelchair accessible.

The Executive Room

The largest and most private of the room categories used to be officers' quarters with portholes facing the ship's bow and the port of Rotterdam. It's offered only in the Original theme, comes with a kingsize bed, and if you book one, check-in includes being personally walked to your room, free run of the minibar, and a full guided tour of the ship.

The Lido Terrace: An Open-Air Deck Over The Water

On the Promenade Deck side of the ship, the Lido Terrace opens up through the warmer months for a drink or a meal with the Rotterdam skyline in view. You don't need to be staying at the hotel to use it – it's open to anyone stopping by – and there's a small paddling pool for kids to cool off in during summer.