This was an excellent cruise. The staff were exceptional. The food was delicious and a good improvement over our cruise in May on Royal Princess.
A few things about the Royal Class ships new and old.
- The carpeting on the stateroom hallways is now colour coded! They have a different accent on each side! Thank you Princess, I missed that on the other Royal Class ships.
- The horn plays the first few bars of the Love Boat Theme. Everyone cheers when they play it!
- If you depart one of the solid elevators, they all face forward.
- If you depart a glass elevator, you face aft. Now you know which way to turn!
- On the three entertainment decks, the washrooms are right by the elevators. The only exception is deck 7 mid ship as the restaurant is in the way so it's the other side of Princess Live.
- Princess Live on the Discovery is opened up. The Royal Princess Live is row seating and hard chairs. They've opened it up on Discovery and it's has the same seating as the Vista Lounge. Nice chesterfields and chairs that rotate. You can view everything in Princess Live from the walkway! Great improvement.
- The Medallion app is good when it works. Many people are frustrated and it's very slow in loading. My favorite feature is "locate shipmates". You can see exactly where they are. Works very well for the Theatre as there are 900 seats and finding someone isn't easy. Go to the app, wait for it to load and you can see the exact area where they are sitting,
- All the staff wore masks. I would estimate 2% of the passengers wore masks. The elevators said "6 maximum". When we saw people crammed in, we would take the stairs. We did a lot of stairs!
- If anyone got COVID, we never heard. No one seems worried about it any more.
- They never announced how many passengers were on the ship. It was much busier than the Royal at 50%, however, they never opened the Juneau Dining Room and there were always seats at the theatre.
- There were a lot of excellent cruise staff doing games and activities. I would say there are more now than before COVID and every activity was very well organized. The crew made up trivia themselves, so it wasn't like the old days when they use the "book" and people who cruised a lot memorized the answers. The prizes were small notebooks. We never won any and I would have given it away if I did.
Now for the negative and I really don't like to criticize, but this is what we found:
- My complaint for an Alaskan cruise is there is no forward inside viewing area. Holland America, Royal Caribbean, Celebrity and Cunard all have lounges that you can sit and see forward. This is a minus for Princess.
- The Sushi Specialty pay restaurant does not have a vegetarian option! There are only a few items on the menu and everyone includes fish or meat. It's right by the casino and you can smell the smoke in the open restaurant.
- No library any more. No books in the stores to buy so if you didn't bring a book, you would be out of luck. We brought books so we were okay. If we have a flight, I never take books because they are heavy and take up room in your carry on. You couldn't download a book as the internet speed, well, that's the next negative.
- Internet availability and speed: I believe the Medallion app is taking up the bandwidth. We've done a lot of cruises and even years ago internet was slow, but not this slow. They said "Being up north in Alaska and mountains cause the problems". We've been to Alaska many times and never experienced this speed. We were leaving Seattle and it was terrible. Then we got on the west side of Vancouver Island with no land in sight, and it didn't improve. I got emails with pdf's and they wouldn't download. I had Facebook posts to view and emails with video's, well that was a waste of time. Nothing would download. I wasn't the only one, so many people complained. One guy was down at Guest Services asking for a refund. We did get emails. Sending an email would take a day in the outbox and then magically disappear! My pictures would load into Google photos, but only half of them in random order. That's why my blog wasn't complete, I couldn't get all the photos to upload! Then two days later they would all show up. Oh well, they are all there now.
We are hoping to sail to Australia next year. There is no way we would go on a vacation with internet this bad. I've put a question on the cruise boards with other cruise lines and they don't appear to have this problem. The speed is not fibre optic speed, but more like 90's dial up. We can live with that. But this service, no way!
