Paying it forward: just back from Caribbean Princess

Hi, all,

We just returned from a week on the Caribbean Princess, and I thought
I'd share a few impressions in case anyone is going soon and has
questions. This is my way of "paying it forward" for the generous help
I received from Lola. She and John did the Caribbean Princess over New
Year's and posted on their return. When we booked our Caribbean
Princess trip in February, I immediately emailed Lola for pointers.
Thanks, Lola, for all the great info and tips!

We cruised March 16-23 out of Ft. Lauderdale with stops in Princess
Cays, St. Maarten and St. Thomas. This was a peak Spring Break week,
as well as the week ending on Easter Sunday, so the demographics were
heavy on extended families. There were roughly 750 kids under 18
aboard, and they expected 950 during the current Easter week! Because
we were cruising with our teens and their grandmother, our party of
five fit right in, and honestly, I thought the crowd was fairly well
behaved...considering. But it wasn't a week to suit everyone's tastes.
It was loud and a bit raucous a lot of the time, there were little
ones to trip over, slow pokes to navigate around (including our own
slow poke!) and a precious few seats by the pool, in the theatre and
alongside the buffet to fight over.

The surprise disappointment was we experienced "March in like a lion"
weather, with many gray, cool and windy days. The seas were moderate,
which caused some tender delays at Princess Cays, late docking at St.
Maarten and cancellation of a number of excursions. It was too rough
to snorkel anywhere, and the surf was so wicked at Coki Beach on St.
Thomas, we had to pull our lounge chairs way up on the beach to stay
dry!

Speaking of port stops, we discovered one of our favorite excursions
ever: the America's Cup sailing race in St. Maarten. No experience
required, quite thrilling! www.12metre.com The $25 beach cabana
shading 2 loungers was well worth the money on Princess Cays (Tom K.
said he found shade, but then he visited Princess Cays with the hoity
toity QM2 group, LOL--there wasn't a lick of shaded beach to be found
when we arrived with the masses). Note, at the newer Crown Bay cruise
dock in St. Thomas (a 15-20 minute walk from downtown Charlotte
Amalie), the going rate for a taxi to Magens Bay is $9 per person and
to Coki Beach is $10 per person. Those are one way charges. Coki
doesn't charge admission, but a beach lounger is $5.

High points about our Caribbean Princess experience: Consistently
excellent dining room food, including a nice variety of vegetarian
offerings on every menu (I'm hitting the cooking sites next in search
of a recipe for goat cheese souffle with garlic sabayon sauce...it was
to die for); super evening wait staff; thoughtful cabin service;
complimentary steam and sauna (some ships assess a fee); and terrific
selection of movies shown in the theatre, on the big screen by the
pool (Movies Under The Stars, complete with blankets and popcorn) and
in your stateroom (yes, we did a lot of vegging this cruise). Oh yeah,
we won some of the best plastic cruise line stuff yet at trivia, and
the piano bar crooner dedicated a song to my MIL each night, which was
sweet.

Low points: Entertainment was lousy; inadequate seating for the large
number of people this big ship carries; purser's staff never got our
key cards straightened out; and persistent sewage smell on Aloha deck,
port side, to the aft...right by our cabins, of course!

Curiosity: For those of you who have cruised with Princess, doesn't it
drive you nuts that they don't publish the dining locations/hours in
the daily Patter? There is a card reviewing dining options stuck in
the front of the big guest services binder on the desk...if you find it,
are you supposed to carry it? memorize it? consult it each morning and
plan ahead?

That pretty much covers everything notable about our Caribbean
Princess cruise. We lost some money in the casino, took some decent
family photos both formal nights and never fired up the computer (but
got voice and data service from Sprint and ATT in St. Thomas, and
unless I'm reading the online account summary incorrectly, it appears
we didn't incur any additional charges for that service). All in all,
we enjoyed a much-needed, low key week being pampered by Princess...life
doesn't get much better than that.

If anyone has questions, I will be happy to try to answer them.

Diana Ball
Austin, TX

In article
, D
Ball wrote:

Consistently excellent dining room food, including a nice variety of
vegetarian offerings on every menu (I'm hitting the cooking sites
next in search of a recipe for goat cheese souffle with garlic
sabayon sauce...it was to die for); super evening wait staff;

Did you do traditional or personal choice dining?

--
Charles

"D Ball" wrote in message
...

You're saying that you had to share Princess Cays with a Cunard group?
Strange that they scheduled a stop there at the same time.
We found the walk into Charlotte Amalie to be more like 30-40 minutes & the
sights along the road weren't the prettiest. It was still worth the time for
the exercise.
We were on the same cruise a year prior & found the same seating problems
although the Entertainment was decent. Did they still have the musicians at
the Horizon buffet in the evenings?

"D Ball" wrote in message
...
Hi, all,

We just returned from a week on the Caribbean Princess, and I thought
I'd share a few impressions in case anyone is going soon and has
questions. This is my way of "paying it forward" for the generous help
I received from Lola. She and John did the Caribbean Princess over New
Year's and posted on their return. When we booked our Caribbean
Princess trip in February, I immediately emailed Lola for pointers.
Thanks, Lola, for all the great info and tips!

We cruised March 16-23 out of Ft. Lauderdale with stops in Princess
Cays, St. Maarten and St. Thomas. This was a peak Spring Break week,
as well as the week ending on Easter Sunday, so the demographics were
heavy on extended families. There were roughly 750 kids under 18
aboard, and they expected 950 during the current Easter week! Because
we were cruising with our teens and their grandmother, our party of
five fit right in, and honestly, I thought the crowd was fairly well
behaved...considering. But it wasn't a week to suit everyone's tastes.
It was loud and a bit raucous a lot of the time, there were little
ones to trip over, slow pokes to navigate around (including our own
slow poke!) and a precious few seats by the pool, in the theatre and
alongside the buffet to fight over.

The surprise disappointment was we experienced "March in like a lion"
weather, with many gray, cool and windy days. The seas were moderate,
which caused some tender delays at Princess Cays, late docking at St.
Maarten and cancellation of a number of excursions. It was too rough
to snorkel anywhere, and the surf was so wicked at Coki Beach on St.
Thomas, we had to pull our lounge chairs way up on the beach to stay
dry!

Speaking of port stops, we discovered one of our favorite excursions
ever: the America's Cup sailing race in St. Maarten. No experience
required, quite thrilling! www.12metre.com The $25 beach cabana
shading 2 loungers was well worth the money on Princess Cays (Tom K.
said he found shade, but then he visited Princess Cays with the hoity
toity QM2 group, LOL--there wasn't a lick of shaded beach to be found
when we arrived with the masses). Note, at the newer Crown Bay cruise
dock in St. Thomas (a 15-20 minute walk from downtown Charlotte
Amalie), the going rate for a taxi to Magens Bay is $9 per person and
to Coki Beach is $10 per person. Those are one way charges. Coki
doesn't charge admission, but a beach lounger is $5.

High points about our Caribbean Princess experience: Consistently
excellent dining room food, including a nice variety of vegetarian
offerings on every menu (I'm hitting the cooking sites next in search
of a recipe for goat cheese souffle with garlic sabayon sauce...it was
to die for); super evening wait staff; thoughtful cabin service;
complimentary steam and sauna (some ships assess a fee); and terrific
selection of movies shown in the theatre, on the big screen by the
pool (Movies Under The Stars, complete with blankets and popcorn) and
in your stateroom (yes, we did a lot of vegging this cruise). Oh yeah,
we won some of the best plastic cruise line stuff yet at trivia, and
the piano bar crooner dedicated a song to my MIL each night, which was
sweet.

Low points: Entertainment was lousy; inadequate seating for the large
number of people this big ship carries; purser's staff never got our
key cards straightened out; and persistent sewage smell on Aloha deck,
port side, to the aft...right by our cabins, of course!

Curiosity: For those of you who have cruised with Princess, doesn't it
drive you nuts that they don't publish the dining locations/hours in
the daily Patter? There is a card reviewing dining options stuck in
the front of the big guest services binder on the desk...if you find it,
are you supposed to carry it? memorize it? consult it each morning and
plan ahead?

That pretty much covers everything notable about our Caribbean
Princess cruise. We lost some money in the casino, took some decent
family photos both formal nights and never fired up the computer (but
got voice and data service from Sprint and ATT in St. Thomas, and
unless I'm reading the online account summary incorrectly, it appears
we didn't incur any additional charges for that service). All in all,
we enjoyed a much-needed, low key week being pampered by Princess...life
doesn't get much better than that.

If anyone has questions, I will be happy to try to answer them.

Diana Ball
Austin, TX

Glad to hear you had a nice week Diana. I'm happy I could help you with
some good info regarding the Caribbean Princess. She wasn't our favourite
ship, but we were on a cruise and we did have a good time.

Lola in Hamilton

Diana, is the theater always overcrowded on Princess' ships? We
experienced the same problem last summer on our Baltic cruise on the
Star Princess. I had the feeling that the theater was not big enough
considering the number of passengers on the ship. (This was the largest
ship we have cruised on so far).

I know that Royal Caribbean and Cunard have even larger ships. Are their
theaters also too small for the number of passengers?

Did you do traditional or personal choice dining?
--
Charles

Hi, Charles,

We made a standing reservation for 6 p.m. at a specific table, with a
certain waiter and assistant, in the Personal Choice dining room to
which we were assigned. So it was like having traditional. That is my
preferred solution to the PC assignment you always get on a last-
minute booking.

BTW, for those who are interested in Caribbean Princess dining
minutiae, we selected the Palm dining room because it was located aft,
and our cabins were aft, thus a single elevator ride away, which was
important for my mobility-challenged MIL. I recommend it to anyone
looking for a quieter dining experience on this ship. Because it is a
little hard to find/get to (it's on deck 6, and deck 6 is one of those
screwy decks with no client passage through the middle), and the other
dining venues are centrally located amidships, it seems the Palm was
rarely full to capacity. The negative about the Palm was the
vibration--for a new ship, the Caribbean Princess just didn't feel
quite right, with a constant level of rumbling vibration at the aft,
among other things. We were seated far aft in the dining room the
first night, and the surface of my wine was rippling the entire time.
It was weird. The permanent table we found was in the most forward
starboard "nook" of the dining room, where the vibration was rarely
noticeable, we were physically separated from the overall din of the
main body of the dining room, and Attila and Ashok took great care of
us and, as it turned out, several tables of nightly regulars.

DKB

PS-How are your crossing plans coming along?

On Mar 25, 6:09*am, "Boomer" wrote:

You're saying that you had to share Princess Cays with a Cunard group?
Strange that they scheduled a stop there at the same time.
We found the walk into Charlotte Amalie to be more like 30-40 minutes & the
sights along the road weren't the prettiest. It was still worth the time for
the exercise.
We were on the same cruise a year prior & found the same seating problems
although the Entertainment was decent. Did they still have the musicians at
the Horizon buffet in the evenings?

Hi, Boomer,

No, we were the only ship that called on Princess Cays that day. You
are right, it was confusing the way I wrote it. Sorry. I was just
teasing Tom K, who recently visited Princess Cays while on a Queen
Mary 2 cruise. Because he and I are both fair and require lots of sun
protection, I asked him about the cabanas...that's where I got the
lore on "plenty of shade" to be found, which wasn't my experience!

It seems like I've read of occasions when Princess and its affiliated
lines have more than one ship scheduled for the Cays...but I couldn't
be sure. I love checking the ports calendars at www.cruisecal.com --
very handy for planning.

I didn't do the walk to Charlotte Amalie myself, so my long-legged
husband and son might have underestimated the time. My daughter and I
started out on the walk just to get a taxi to take us to Coki. It was
a bit aggravating. Because no one wanted to go to Coki at the same
time we did, the taxi stand "director" started telling us lies about
Coki to try to get us to change to another beach so he could cram us
into a half-filled taxi and avoid sending a taxi out with just two
people (for the uninitiated, "taxis" on St. Thomas are shared van
rides in big vans or multi-seat open-air jitneys). So we just walked
out of the cruise terminal and hit the road toward town, we got picked
up in a few minutes.

Regarding entertainment, I don't know about musicians in the Horizon
Court, as we ate all dinners in the dining room. We did enjoy the
several different individual and groups of musicians who played in the
atrium every afternoon and evening, and Bert Stratton was the piano
man my MIL enjoyed so much (my husband and I thought he was fun for
one night--he is something of a legend, folks either love him or hate
him, apparently, this was his last week at sea for a while). We like
production shows and were disappointed to find we had already seen the
two shows featured during the week--and the last time we cruised on a
Princess ship was 16 months ago, which shows how "stale" their
rotation program is. There was no headline musical entertainment the
entire week, which was a first in our 18 cruises across all mass
market lines; rather, they filled all those spots with
comedians...including Sarge, another Princess standby we've seen (and
not liked) before...and magicians. It sorta hurt when we were in port
with the Costa Fortuna and heard some of her pax talking about the
Three Dog Night show on their cruise. Okay, so I'm a sucker for those
old groups that play the cruise circuit. So this is why we rated
the entertainment fair...but like food, that's such a subjective
factor, others might have thought it was a bang up cruise in the
entertainment department.

So, thanks for reading my review. Where are you going next, Boomer?

Diana

Glad to hear you had a nice week Diana. *I'm happy I could help you with
some good info regarding the Caribbean Princess. *She wasn't our favourite
ship, but we were on a cruise and we did have a good time.

Lola in Hamilton

Lola, you really did save me--I didn't have time to do much homework
for this one, so I so appreciated all of your help!

I agree with your takeaway 100%: The Caribbean Princess wasn't our
favorite ship, but hey, we were out there, and it was fun!

I see you talking about going on the Solstice with the GGC2009...that
will be an interesting new ship for you to explore.

Thanks, again,

Diana

On Mar 25, 7:17*am, (Jeff Gersten) wrote:
Diana, is the theater always overcrowded on Princess' ships? We
experienced the same problem last summer on our Baltic cruise on the
Star Princess. I had the feeling that the theater was not big enough
considering the number of passengers on the ship. (This was the largest
ship we have cruised on so far).

I know that Royal Caribbean and Cunard have even larger ships. Are their
theaters also too small for the number of passengers?

Hi, Jeff, nice to hear from you,

Honestly, I don't recall having the same theatre over-crowding problem
on other Princess ships (we've been on two Sun-class ships and two
Grand-class ships, including the Star Princess). But if you found that
to be the case on the Star in the Baltics, then perhaps Princess does
need to pay more attention to theatre capacity in its new builds. I
had quickly read a few reviews of the Caribbean Princess before we
left to see if I could pick up on any trends in the comments, and the
theatre crowding was mentioned often, with the tip to go as early as
possible before show time to get a seat.

It seems the way Princess is dealing with this on the Caribbean
Princess is to schedule a variety of competing entertainers in various
venues, so, e.g., there'd be the production show in the theatre and,
at the same time, a comedian in one of the lounges, as well as the
usual assortment of house bands in other lounges and MUTS out on deck.
The problem, of course, is when everyone wants to see the "main act"
of the night....

As for Royal Caribbean, we've been on the Liberty in the Freedom
class, two of the Explorer-class chips and a Vision-class ship, and I
don't recall theatre over-crowding being an issue, but I stand to be
corrected. For our family's tastes and interests, Royal Caribbean
offers the best entertainment on the seas, so we can be found in the
theatre almost any given night of a Royal Caribbean cruise.

We've never done Cunard, so can't comment on their ship theatres.

Are you cruising this year, Jeff?

Diana

"D Ball" wrote in message
...
Glad to hear you had a nice week Diana. I'm happy I could help you with
some good info regarding the Caribbean Princess. She wasn't our favourite
ship, but we were on a cruise and we did have a good time.

Lola in Hamilton

Lola, you really did save me--I didn't have time to do much homework
for this one, so I so appreciated all of your help!

I agree with your takeaway 100%: The Caribbean Princess wasn't our
favorite ship, but hey, we were out there, and it was fun!

I see you talking about going on the Solstice with the GGC2009...that
will be an interesting new ship for you to explore.

Thanks, again,

Diana

No problem Diana, glad to help. I agree with you about the ride on the
Caribbean Princess. I found she rode very badly, especially one night when
we had high seas. I don't mind the motion, but some of the passengers were
quite loud in their complaints.

Yes, we are booked on the GGC2009!!!!

Lola in Hamilton