Cruise Raider

We have had so much fun cruising together over the years and hopefully, many more years to come. That first cruise back out on the Majestic honestly felt like the day I got my life back. But the eclipse cruise was truly something special. Ivan was so great at his job! I loved getting to know him a bit during this cruise! And if Adam is a nerd, he’s a very lovable one, indeed!

Loved those photos and videos you all took! I ran up there that you’d have thought I won it! Lol We also got a screen print from the app that said concierge would contact us shortly. Crickets! I am sure we will get it but it really has been longer than I thought to get a response. I asked Maja, the future cruise consultant and she said the concierge had just gone home. Not sure what to make of that .. back to her room or off the ship. That was late at night on the 12th. I’m sure our CVP will help me get to the bottom of it if we haven’t heard back within a couple of weeks.

We have been in those cabins on sister ships and can confirm the sofa is always by the balcony. And yes, you will have noise up on the Marina deck right under a public deck but you shouldn’t have any issues on the Riviera deck. The Princess deck plans are pretty reliable. Some of these aft cabins have larger balconies. Yes, some people can see down onto your balcony from above but honestly, I’ve never seen anyone make a habit of staring. Plus, they can’t see you if you are sitting back near the sliding door. One issue we have encountered is soot on our balcony. The room stewards are fastidious about keeping it clean .. just don’t wear white and sit down on your balcony chair without a putting a towel down first. To see actual photos of the cabins you are looking to book, you can check out cruisedeckplans.com

I was a huge fan of Celebrity and only cruised with Princess because they placed a ship in our home port of San Francisco. After the restart from CoVid, I completely changed my opinions of what I loved about cruising. We had a Celebrity cruise booked and paid in full for a few years before it finally came to fruition last year. Since we were already down in Los Angeles, we decided to book a side by side with our celebrity cruise followed by hopping terminals to cruise on Princess next. The differences were stark! We didn’t have a bad time on Celebrity, it just wasn’t Princess, which we’ve grown to love. We both said, “now we’re home” when having our first drink up at Bellinis. I did recently post a wish list for Princess on this forum and do have a complaint now and again, but our experiences since July 2021 have won us over and we now consider Princess cruises over all other lines. Increased costs may leave our travel budget short so, we may not be able to cruise as often but everything else in our daily cost of living has gone up as well. I am a bit of a Princess cheerleader .. maybe more than a bit. But, I’m also not an apologist. There will never be another Jan Schwartz so JP had a very large pair of shoes to fill. I don’t think he’s done everything perfectly but also don’t blame him for much of the cost cutting, the changing cruise environment, the roll out of the Sun or many other issues that pop up from time to time. I think inflation has hit every cruise line and the CoVid shut down and the difficult recovery has really hit the cruise lines hard. Princess is still filling their ships to max capacity and think they have a solid product for all ages.

For the Catch, that really surprises me. We went 3 times during the cruise and the service was phenomenal. I try to always go to the Marriage Match game show but missed it this time as there were so many other things going on at the same time. Hope that was fun for you both.

We usually only go to the MDR for lunch, which is usually our big meal for the day. I oftentimes ask the assistant waiter for a nice glass with my wine and bingo, it’s always been done. Sometimes I will only get the plus package (on the non Royal class ships) and order a glass of wine from the premier package and just pay the difference.

I am going to try this. A friend of mine has made mention this is what she does. at least I write out a list of everyone that made our cruise special and put them in their proper areas on that list. I take photos of name tags so I don’t misspell their names on the survey, although autocorrect tries to trip me up every time.

I would have been ok if they notified me by email to save resources and a friend did send us a beautiful arrangements of roses and there was a card with that. We area but disappointed that we were not notified of our balcony breakfast, which is something we would have really enjoyed. Your last comment as spot on but we’ve cruise as recently as a month ago and received an email with our final post cruise folio. This decision, if that is what is in, is new. I am pretty sure I don’t approve.

So, you all got me wondering and I sent in a post cruise request for my folio. I’m sure hoping that this isn’t the new noraml that don’t send one out. As mentioned before, we’ve had invalid charges added on to our folio after we’ve disembarked and have gotten them refunded because of the post cruise folio brought our attention to them. I mentioned that others seemed to failed to get their post cruise folio on this sailing as well. I will let you all know if I get anything back from Princess on this thread. As mentioned before, I will not let these issues take away from the fabulous experience we had onboard during this cruise.

I may contact Princess to find out what happened to our final folio. It seems to be in order to at least find out why nobody received theirs.

I will .. am waiting patiently for now. I have quite a bit of refundable OBC coming back to me so, am hoping if I don’t get the folio, I will soon get my check from Bottomline.

I sure hope so, too! I can’t imagine they would just take it away. We cruised on 3 cruises before this one so far this year and have always gotten our folios sent back by email within a day or two of disembarkation. I know they were having some system issues on this cruise as evidenced by all the in transit passengers getting charged for using their package on April 3rd. Perhaps that is the issue. Guest services got them all removed but they all had to be done manually .. on our bill, it was quite the chore as we were definitely in a celebratory mood. 😆

Agreed!

Now that we’ve been home from the perfect cruise experience, I have a couple of issues we’ve learned about since returning home. I will definitely keep my focus on all the positives and won’t let these couple issues color my experience in a negative light .. but here goes! We found out our CVP sent us an ultimate balcony breakfast but not until after the cruise. Our first room steward was so very good, so not sure it was him that dropped the ball. We never knew about it until we got back home as there was no card sent to our cabin to let us know about it. Also, we won on the Princess Prizes but no instructions on how to collect this and no notification from the Princess concierge as noted under ‘Prizes’ in our app. it’s been nearly a week since we’ve been home and hoping my research on how to collect our prize will pan out. I don’t think they are trying to renege on the prize, it’s just not been handled very well. I’m still not sure if my efforts on how to collect it has worked as I left a message and later, sent in a form and haven’t heard anything back as of yet. I will give it a couple of weeks before I see if my efforts paid off. Lastly, we never received a post cruise folio in our email post cruise, nor has anyone else that we know of. I did take a screen shot on the last morning but, have had changes after the fact on that on previous cruises. I want to make sure that what we saw on our folio via the app is final.

I have one more addition to my wish list that could be easily accomplished. I really need a couple more places on the post cruise survey for commendations for specific crew members. 5 areas of service are just not enough and I always feel someone that has made our cruise special is being left out. I also learned that if you don’t fill out your post cruise survey within 3 days of disembarkation, the crew never sees your comments. While I understand it, it’s not always easy to get to it within 3 days while also unpacking, doing laundry, cooking meals, sorting mails and paying bills, etc. If we fly to get home from our cruise, I always work on it at the airport. It takes me at least 2 hours to fill it out completely. Anyway, 5 areas for the commendations are not enough. I wish Princess would add a few more options to this.