Island Princess 11/16/2016 Balcony use restriction

[Essiesmom]

I’m leaving on Jan. 9,2018 for a 15 day cruise thru Panama Canal. Booked thru an online travel agent two months ago & discussed at length the best balcony on the port side. All done & paid for; all checked in online, excursions & restaurants booked well in advance. A week before departing I signed in & decided to go deeper into the site & I found under “Notifications” the Promenade Deck Balcony Advisory! What? None of the 18 balcony’s that are on the 7th deck will be able to use their balcony during the complete Panama Canal crossing! I had planned to not do an excursion on this one day & to just relax & sit on our balcony. Why was this restriction not red highlighted? I received no communication of any kind !

Completely unacceptable! Never again for Princess Cruises!

 

So sorry you had to search out Cruise Critic because you didn't do due diligence in booking. This is also something your travel agency should have made you aware of. There are a couple of things here: If you read the rest of this 3 year old thread, you will see that access to your balcony is only limited while you are in the locks. there are many hours that you will be sailing the canal that do not involve the locks. And indeed, you do not want to spend your transit sitting on your balcony seeing 30% or less of what there is to see. Second, there are no excursions offered on a full transit day. Those are only offered on partial transits.

Refusing to sail Princess again because they didn't specifically highlight something you would have seen if you had carefully read everything is pretty immature. EM

[Soon2Be2]

No excursions on a full day crossing Panama Canal? Wrong! There are a number of them that day; you need to do your due diligence before posting wrong info. And before one can read all the fine print, buried 4 levels down on Princess’ site, you have to logged into your “Personal Cruiser” site, which means i’ve had to input my “booking #” which means I have paid. This deep level info IS NOT posted before booking! As for doing due diligence I only joined Cruise Critic today, in my search to see if in any of their thousands of posts there was any warning about restricted balcony use? Furthermore, your arrogant, offensive tone is unbecoming for the rules of this site. Did you fail to read them beforehand? You don’t have to first pay to signup in order to learn this you know!

[frugaltravel]

I think you will be thankful that you won't be able to use the balcony for the locks. You would see so little. You need to be out on a public deck where you can see more than just directly outside your balcony! I spent most of the day up front outside. Great view. But you can also be toward the back or even on an upper deck going from side to side. But I pity those on any deck who would be on their balconies the entire time. They miss much of what there is to see in a PC transit.