I took the Pacific Coast re-positioning cruise on 9/30 which was supposed to stop in Victoria, Seattle, and San Francisco. As others have pointed out, boarding was a nightmare. When we booked the cruise many months before, boarding was supposed to be at 3:30 PM. Then when we received our luggage tags in the mail, the boarding time had magically changed to 7:30 PM. Then, due to the ridiculous line on the departure day, we didn't actually get on the ship until at least 10:00 PM. This was particularly crappy, because we have have a 6-year-old and had to return our rental car before 6:00 PM. And obviously we had to check out of our hotel much earlier in the day. So we ended up hanging out at a food court across the street from the cruise terminal for hours after 6:00 PM. Pretty awful.

Once on board, we read that the itinerary had changed such that we were no longer stopping in Seattle. Of course, there was no legitimate or concrete reason provided for this, nor did the Captain or anyone else bother to explain or apologize for ripping us off. I was eating at the buffet one day, and one of the head dudes on the ship (not the captain, but the second or third in command) was going around talking to people. When he approached me, I asked him why we didn't stop in Seattle. He made up some excuse about not being able to coordinate enough Customs workers to process passengers. As if this was all new to them and the ship didn't spend all summer going in and out of Seattle. Ridiculous. I suspect the real reason we didn't go is because of extreme disorganization/incompetence on the part of the crew/ Cruise line which was a common theme throughout the trip. We eventually got a $100 credit to our cabin for the missed port. How generous.

Just as others experienced, getting off in San Francisco was also a nightmare. It took 45 minutes to get off the ship, and this was with a few line cuts (thanks to some of the crew) because we had an excursion that we were late for. This was not our fault, as we were initially told that we had to disembark the ship floor-by-floor, and were supposed to wait for our floor to be called before disembarking. Read more