TriumphGuy

Trying to decide whether to add an international phone plan or if we can just get away with using in port wireless on Antigua, Barbados, St Kitts, St Lucia, St Thomas. Does anyone know whether wireless is available either at the port themselves or at bars or restaurants? We don't need or want constant communication, just the ability to send/receive email and check up on things at home. 

Also, Princess used to offer wireless by the minute in the past which worked well for us. We'd compose an email in a text editor, connect to the ship's wireless and paste the email into our email and send. Do they still offer the by the minute plan? 

 

There are no 'wash stations' with soap and water at the Horizon Court entrances on the Crown but there are Purell stands and more times than not, there was a crew member standing there asking people to use one. There are rest rooms near the Horizon Court where you can wash your hands prior to entering.  We were on the Crown in November 2018 and will be again in May 2019 in case someone wants to know where I got my information.

Well, that's a bummer. We are somewhat fanatical about hand washing in public venues. We always used the wash stations at the buffet entrances on the Grand. Since the Grand is one of the oldest, if not THE oldest ship in the fleet, it is a mystery to me why it has the wash stations but the Crown does not.

Maybe they will add them at the next drydock refit? 

Purell, while helpful, is not as effective as soap and hot water in combatting Noro. Better than nothing though, I suppose.

Just curious, does the Crown have hand wash stations (with soap and hot water)  at the entrance to the Buffet? I know the Grand had them in April 2017, have they been added to the Crown? 

We did this cruise on the Grand in April 2017, for our 40th anniversary. Being from Chicago, cold is relative. It was chilly the first day, mostly from the wind chill. I love the sea days and spend them reading, wandering the ship, doing trivia, etc. The islands were great. We rented a car on Maui and just drove along the coast. At Honolulu we did a Princess excursion to Pearl Harbor, which was a disappointment because it was out to the Memorial and back and no time to visit the museum. We spent a long time waiting for stragglers on the bus. My advice, take the public bus and do your own Pearl Harbor excursion.

At Kauai, we did an airplane flight with Wings Over Kauai, very reasonable, we were the only ones in the plane and the pilot gave a detailed narrated 65 minute tour.

On the Big Island, we did the Hop on Hop Off bus, a great way to see the highlights for very little money.

The trip back was fine until we got to Ensenada, it was chilly and rainy and we didn't even get off the ship. 

On the last sea day, we did the Ultimate Ship's Tour. It was very rough, with 15 foot seas. We were fine until we got to the bridge part of the tour. They were handing out champagne and hors d'ouerves and my poor wife was green from the motion. Up on the bridge it was like a roller coaster ride, Up, up, up, and then down, down, down into the trough. My wife said, "I have to get out of here or I'm going to be sick". It would not do to have her ralphing on the bridge, so we went down to the Promanade deck where the motion was less and she started to feel better. Then, up to our cabin, aft on A deck. She barely made it in the door. 

My advice, if you are prone to motion sickness, take along some Bonine and use it.

Would we do the trip again? Absolutely! Loved the Grand, the staff, and the trip in general. The seasickness was a minor part. (although my wife might disagree with that)

Thanks for the review! We'll be on the Crown early February on a 10 day Eastern Caribbean. Nice to hear good things about the ship.

1 hour ago, GloriaF said:

The sand is crushed coral.  That is why it is so sharp. Water shoes definitely needed.  

 

I think P Cays is a fun beach day! 

I'll definitely be bringing my rubber beach sandals. Thanks!

Thank you all for the insight and tips. We'll probably skip the clamshells and try for the free loungers. DW and I are early morning types and would probably head back to the ship early afternoon anyway. Nap time, you know!

Thanks again.

Having never been to Princess Cays before, can someone tell me if there are lounge chairs available on the beach for passengers? Is it a giant free for all to get one? Princess has a Clamshell Rental in the excursions listing, clamshell for two with lounge chairs for $40. Worth it or not? 

Thanks.

23 minutes ago, XBGuy said:

 

I have no "medallion" cruises scheduled.  I am a reasonably smart guy, and I am reasonably technical--40 years in the industry.  However, I never want to be on the bleeding edge of technology.  I am happy to wait for the "early adapters" find all the bugs before I step up to use it.

And the security flaws. 

Being also from an IT background, I agree completely. Let others be the beta testers.

On 11/28/2018 at 12:26 PM, Ep010835 said:

 

I added photos of our passports as the ap described. Even doing so, our passports were checked 3 times during the boarding process. My guess is that this OM component is not yet operational.   

 

I took photos of each of us as the app described and made them part of our individual profiles. First thing that happened when we set foot on the boat? We had our pictures taken. These onsite photos were added to our shipboard profiles. As it turned out, taking our own photos at home was a waste of time.

 

Although adding a credit card is not (yet?) part of the ap, we added our cc info to our booking before leaving home so were never asked to produce a cc during checkin/boarding  

Well, call me Captain Paranoia, but uploading photos of Passports is a non-starter for me. I have enough of a concern with entering in my credit card and Passport information into the Personalizer. I don't trust Princess' IT department or anything in between. 

What happens to your Passport info? Where is it stored and how is it used? 

Inputting info is one thing but actual photos of the Passport? Uh, no thanks! 

My bet is it was a server hardware failure. Probably one server went down which controls or hosts some of the sites, which would explain why some boards were available and not others.

It is never good practice to place all your eggs in one basket, by distributing the load it prevents the entire site from failing. 

Either that or some emergency software updates were needed and they had to take it offline to do so.

We are also on this Feb 5th cruise on Crown, pretty much newbies to the Caribbean, although I had been to St Thomas and the BVI's many, many years ago, in the mid 70's. We did a partial Panama Canal transit a few years back, but no experience with the islands. So we will be following this post also. 

Same thing happened to us, out to SFO on United, home to Chicago on American. Was not a problem other than we did not get TSA pre-check on the American flight. 

8 hours ago, sfdragonboy said:

Hi TriumphGuy!  We literally were right there about to anchor and go to tenders but the waves were just too strong.  Considering it is "only" Princess Cay, I wouldn't expect Princess to come up with another port even if foreseen ahead of time.  Like Cheeseclan said, it would just be probably another sea day.  I feel the sea days on this itinerary were really needed since you get on, the sea days relax you, you are then hit with the ports right after each other, then the return sea days allow you to relax again.

 

You should have a great time in a couple of months.  Man, it was already pretty warm in several ports.  We in San Francisco are not used to such nice weather in December.  Needless to say, keep the bottled water nearby...

Thanks for replying. I actually love sea days. On our Panama Canal cruise a few years back we missed Costa Rica because seas were too rough in the port itself. While disappointing, we understood the need for safety comes first and enjoyed the sea day which replaced it. I wasn't sure what they did in the case of Princess Cays though.

Thanks for the review!

If Princess Cays is cancelled, what is the alternative? Another port or additional sea day? We're doing this cruise in February, also our 3rd cruise.

Thanks for the video.

Nice to see, we'll be on Sun Princess in April 2020, such a long way off!

I'm on a MacBook Air, no problem here, but I use Chrome and Firefox. Sounds like an issue with Safari not clearing out cached websites in a timely manner. 

I've heard that you may not get what you want if you wait til you're on board. I always order ahead of time.

Chrome tends to push the envelope as far as website security goes. They have made a lot of changes recently and website owners have been scrambling to keep up.

You may need to refresh your browser, clear history, cookies etc. You may even be running an older version of Chrome, Firefox, etc. Check for browser updates, which should always be kept up to date anyway.

2 hours ago, bemis12 said:

 

 That would be theft. Only you can judge your tolerance for thievery.

I would call Princess' change of policy to not honor something people paid good money for, "theft".

There was a notice yesterday that parts of the site would be unavailable from 8am (pst) to 11pm today (Sunday 12/9) due to site maintenance.

Good question. We have booked with both Princess and a TA (through a major credit card company). Booking with Princess once, we got a lot of OBC but paid full fare. For our upcoming February cruise through the TA  we will get 10% back on our card ($300), plus a small amount of OBC. The fare was good though, have not found it cheaper.

We booked a Australia cruise for 2020 through Princess with the $1 deposit and 3 Perk sale. I may transfer that booking as we get closer, if there is a rebate offer from the TA.

We witnessed this intimidating type of behavior at San Francisco port last year, boarding for our Hawaii cruise. A longshoreman was flinging F bombs at a passenger for carrying his own bags, telling him he couldn't do that. I thought the passenger was going to lay him out. This went on for at least five minutes. Not sure how how it was resolved as we entered the terminal.

I don't want to deal with our luggage, so we tip, $5 a bag. But attitude is everything. All the guys we have dealt with have been polite and accommodating. If I got some jerk like that longshoreman, I'd stand there and yell for the cops.

Thanks for the review, we'll be on Crown in February. I did not know that the Sanctuary pool was open to everyone, assuming this is fleet wide? When we were on our Hawaii cruise on the Grand, I never saw anyone in the Sanctuary pool. Nice to know!

I experience this when I use a bookmark in Chrome to the Princess Cruises Page here on CruiseCritic. The workaround for me is to not use a bookmark but to just type in cruisecritic.com and navigate to the Boards page, find the Princess page and it logs me in. Yes, a bit of a pain, but it seems to work and I'm sure they'll get the problem fixed as soon as they can. 

Personally, I think it is a glitch with their autologin "feature". The user should have the option to turn off the  "Remember Me" option on login, I don't recall seeing a way to do so.