This was our tenth cruise with Princess and it’s likely to be our last. It was a real treat for my sixtieth birthday and as we boarded in Japan and left the ship in Vancouver, via Alaska it was an excellent itinerary. The issue was the ship. Sewage smell, random temperatures, clearly not enough staff who seemed stressed and over worked. A few specifics: hubby ordered flowers ($55), after 3 days they were pretty much dead. I took them customer service desk where a pretty uninterested young lady advised me they were only meant to last 3-4 days. I said that this was not mentioned in the literature to order ( it’s more about how fabulous they are etc, no mention of how lucky no they will last), for $55 I would expect at least a week. They did take the dead ones out and put the few remaining into a glass vase but only after I insisted ( the young lady at first said they cannot do this but I persisted). Crown Grill was terrible, the only decent item of the main course was the actual steak, everything else was cold and in the same dishes they use at the buffet (Malamite). Certainly not fine dining. In fairness, After raising this with customer service via a meeting we insisted on having they did ‘as a gesture of good will’ refund both the flowers and crown grill costs.

Dining room had friendly staff but the food was typically cold until we asked for it to be hot and then it was always super hot. There were a couple of times when the order can wrong, I I mean the entire main course, and when this was queried our friend was advised that he had ordered it! We were there and he didn’t . Waiter went on to argue saying he had written it down and put the pad under our noses. This happened three times to our friend and became a bit of a joke, we laughed saying it must be his accent :-). We also believe Princess should stop calling it fine dining, you have a beef burger on the ‘available every day’ menu, and what happened to the Parmesan basket for the pasta, maybe small things but endemic of the feel of the experience, trying to cut expenses me thinks.

The internet manager went sick so nothing could be done to sort out any problems as only he had ‘the code’ and it couldn’t be given to anybody else. Lots of folks getting very upset as the sign on the desk said (and remained there all the time) back in 15 mins and also another gave hours when the manager would be there. Read more