Pride of America Review
Rating by category
Additional details
My husband and I are new to cruising on the open water (we have done the river cruise in Europe) and chose this Cruise as our introduction to cruising because it only travels around the islands and does not spend days at sea. This Cruise was everything it purported to be, with a very casual atmosphere, great daily entertainment, excellent operational systems and amazingly helpful staff. I read some of the critical reviews and can only say that these people obviously do not plan properly. Every specialty restaurant we tried was superb - the food was 5 star and the efficiency of the staff was top notch. Yes sometimes there were people waiting for tables, but this was mainly because they had large parties (5-6 or more) and hadn't booked. The specialty restaurants are limited in capacity and no one wants to rush you through your meal, so the best way to go about eating at one of these is to plan ahead and book, its easy, the facilities are on board and easily accessible. You can't expect to rock up to a restaurant of this type at home without a booking, so why would you expect it to be otherwise on board? There are so many eating options we could not fit all of them into our 7 nights, we did however try 7 different ones and rated all of them as excellent. The cruise for us (coming from Australia) was great value and the perfect introduction to cruising, the rules were flexible which made for a very relaxing atmosphere. We spent one night in Honolulu prior to the cruise and a further 2 nights there post cruise, the accommodation and extras in this package made the trip extremely enjoyable. As it was our 4th time in Honolulu, it was wonderful to experience the laid back feel of the other islands by taking this cruise - the contrasts with Honolulu are amazing. As well as enjoying the various island highlights, we feel very privileged to have witnessed lava flowing into the sea, and to have seen the beautiful Na Pali coastline's magnificent cliff sides, with nature providing the most amazingly brilliant Rainbow just to add to the experience. This was a wonderful trip for us and we would not hesitate to recommend it to all our friends.
Cabin Review
Mid-Ship Balcony
Cabin was compact but was fine for our purposes and had a huge amount of storage space - we only used part of this! The shower though small in size was very efficient and we had excellent water temperature at all times. There was absolutely no noise transference between cabins and in fact we still do not know who was on either side of us as we never saw or heard them entering or leaving. Carmen our room steward was very attentive and helpful as were all the other staff we encountered. Our cabin was situated under the Pool deck area, but the only time we heard any noise from the entertainment pool side was when we were sitting on our veranda.
Port Reviews
Kauai
We did not take any Kauai excursions as we had previously visited Kauai and had already done done most of the sites when we were much younger. We settled for a free trolley ride to the local shops and beach, then walked into the beautiful grounds of the Marriott Hotel to look around. This had been suggested to us by the staff at Cagney's Restaurant on the ship the night before, it was a lovely laid-back excursion.