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Unexpected Service Issues on the Crown Princess & where we found them - Photo Review

WinksCruises

By WinksCruises,
in Princess Cruises

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WinksCruises

WinksCruises

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For those of you wondering what a Princess Suite complimentary bar set-up looks like, we’ve posted a photo of it below.

 

In real life, it’s simply not as glamourous as what’s described in the Princess promotional brochure. Basically, all you get is two airline nip-bottles each of vodka, gin, Scotch whiskey and cognac. Voila!

 

In the past, Mrs. Winks and I have simply tossed these unwanted mini bottles into our suitcases for the trip back home (all the time praying the Customs won’t question us about them!). And there they sit in a neat row on our liquor shelf, waiting for the day a house guest will make use of them. So far, not takers.

 

Also, as part of the complimentary bar set-up, Princess stocks the mini-bar fridge with canned mixers - club soda, tomato juice, colas and tonic water. But as we mentioned earlier, we arranged for room service to trade out the whole agglomeration of liquor for a single bottle of Cabernet wine. And from what I understand, they will also trade out the bar service for a specialty coffee card. Check out the details with your booking.

 

While charming, the whole bar set-up amenity hails back to the glory days of steamship cruising, when someone might actually mix a highball out on the balcony. But not so much anymore. Mrs. Winks and I just want to slam unlimited tequila shots at the pool bar using our beverage package! Wraahhr!! So it’s probably a perk that could use a refurb.

 

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Our first night’s dinner was spent in the Anytime Dining Room, where we found the food, just as we did at our boarding lunch earlier in the day, only adequate. My prime rib was pretty fatty and flat.

 

Mrs. Winks dined on three “starters”, shrimp, salad and a cold fruit soup, which she’d always enjoyed in the past, but none of them wowed her this time. The desserts were about the only menu item that stood out. Of the five nights of the cruise, we only used the dining room twice. The second time because it was Tom Turkey night, and who doesn’t love a touch of Thanksgiving’s homey comfort at sea?

 

Service was functional, but the Anytime Dining phenomenon has seriously undermined the traditional diner / wait staff relationship that, while pretentious and inauthentic, always made the cruise experience unique – it was a chance to befriend your regular nightly waiters and run through the motions of pretending to care about each other’s days. Like in a marriage! Sadly, the Anytime Dining option has reduced the quality of this relationship to that which we might share with any of the anonymous servers we encounter at the local Cracker Barrel or Denny’s.

 

After dinner, we by-passed the welcome aboard show, nearly got a case of emphysema sitting in the smoke-filled casino, and eventually ended up in the Wheelhouse Bar, which is always one of our favorite hangouts on a Princess ship. We enjoyed a post-dinner drink and nibbled on the spicy cocktail nut mix while listening to a musical duo belt out pop hits. Before turning in for the evening, we checked out the very well attended “Dr. Strange” screening up at Movie Under the Stars (MUTS) where audience members were wrapped up in plaid blankets on specially outfitted loungers around the pool deck.

 

Other movies that played on MUTS during our cruise included: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Florence Foster Jenkins, and La La Land.

 

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Overnight, the Crown Princess made her way out of the Bahama channel and skirted the north coast of Cuba which we would hug for most of the day. Mrs. Winks had her mind set on a 9 am Zumba class, so we got up early and headed up to Sabatini’s where every morning, Suite Guests can enjoy a quiet breakfast away from the blood and carnage that’s going on just a deck below at the breakfast buffet in Horizon Court.

 

I’m taking back what I said earlier about free dry cleaning being Princess’s best suite perk. It’s actually having these made-to-order breakfasts at Sabatini’s, overlooking the aft pool and ship’s wake. The staff is always attentive and these are the actual crew members we get to know over the course of the voyage… David, Oscar and Hector. We learn about their lives on board and the families they miss back at home. Occasionally, they’ll impart a little bit of juicy ship gossip, like a waiter who missed a port sail away or someone who’s been asked to leave by the captain. These stories always go great with your plate of Eggs Benedict and a Mimosa!

 

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After breakfast, Mrs. Winks hurried down to the Club Fusion lounge where one of the cruise director’s staff members led a Zumba class at 9 am on sea days. Why they hold this dance exercise in a space crowded with oversized lounge chairs and wooden banisters that jut out at every turn is beyond me. It seems it would make a lot more sense to hold it up on the basketball court or out by the pool. In the past, we’ve been told there’s some infighting between the Lotus Spa Fitness Center and the Cruise Director’s staff, with Zumba falling under the Cruise Director’s portion of the house, not Fitness’s. And the Fitness juiceheads don’t want the mamby-pamby Zumba dancers invading their turf. It’s sort of like West Side Story, but at sea.

 

As Mrs. Winks flailed about the Club Fusion lounge with twenty-five or so other people, I headed over to the Explorer’s Lounge where one of the multimedia staff was hosting a GoPro Tips seminar. While his presentation was essentially a thinly veiled infomercial for the new GoPro5 (that was conveniently for sale - at a duty-free price - in the photo gallery), the guy did provide some tips, often times showing us footage he had shot during shore excursions (for the Reflections DVDs) to illustrate his point.

 

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By afternoon, the sun had burned through the overcast, and a stampede for deck chairs began. The space around the pool deck quickly filled up, as it usually does, but the pool staff unlocked some new loungers (that we had seen a crane hoisting to the top deck back at Port Everglades) that were probably supposed to stay chained up until the European itineraries started in couple of weeks. But the sun worshipping natives, were restless, so, fearing for their lives, the deck staff began dragging out lounge chair upon lounge chair and setting them up at a sunny spot positioned under the ship’s funnel.

 

Mrs. Winks took advantage of the chair set-up and settled in with her tablet to do some reading and sunbathing. All seemed to be going well, as fellow passengers nestled into their spots and the chair war tensions seem to subside… UNTIL, a maintenance guy dressed in white overalls started pitching a fit. Everyone needed to leave the sunny space immediately, he announced, the crew needed to lay down new decking and the area that had just been created to accommodate us was now closed. All anarchy broke loose!

 

Who scheduled this type of maintenance during a sea day and at the height of sunbathing time? Couldn’t this activity been saved for a port day or overnight hours? Like Syrian refugees that no one wanted, the sunbathers were forced to relocate, dragging their lounges behind them like it was all they had left in the world.

 

Fortunately, Mrs. Winks had a sunny aft balcony waiting for her down in the stateroom, where, shaking her head at the nonsense going on up at the sun deck, she spent the rest of the afternoon in peace and quiet.

 

Shown below is the area in question, after it was “re-carpeted” with the spongey aqua-colored decking.

 

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As the sun melted into the Caribbean Sea, we started to get ready for our 5-day itinerary’s only formal night. Canapes and corsages were delivered to the stateroom late in the afternoon, as was our formal wear dry cleaning. Once dressed, we explored the photo gallery looking for our boarding, sail away and dinner photos, stopped by the Piazza where the champagne waterfall was being poured and then gravitated to the Wheelhouse Bar where a new guitarist / singer, her first gig on a cruise ship ever, was debuting her act. Apparently, she’d been a contestant on the UK version of The Voice singing talent TV show.

 

We finished our pre-dinner drink and headed down to the Crown Grille where we had an 8:30 pm reservation. The Grille was very busy this formal night, and there was a small line to get in. The couple in front of us were wearing t-shirts and shorts, and we figured maybe they were just stopping by to make a reservation for another day. But then it became clear they were actually there for dinner. I instantly pulled out my phone for a little Snapchat action. Shorts allowed at Crown Grille on formal night? This was a Cruise Critic forum thread dream come true!

 

We were shocked when the couple was actually shown a table, but the real fireworks began about a minute later when a diner stormed up to the maître d stand screaming, “You’re seating people dressed in shorts and T-Shirts at Crown Grille, now!? And you seat them next to me? I’m not putting up with this!” and he stormed out of the venue. We half-expected John Quinones to step out from behind the corner with a camera crew for this special edition of “What Would You Do? The Cruise Ship” but when he didn’t, Mrs. Winks looked up at the shell-shocked maître d (who we then saw was David, from our morning Sabatini’s crew) and said, “Well, it is formal night after all. Isn’t there a dress code here?”

 

David responded that yes, they wouldn’t normally have seated a couple dressed like that, but that they had a note flagged to their reservation. It turns out, they were one of the late arrivals at yesterday’s embarkment fiasco - and their luggage never made it on the ship! They literally only had the clothes on their back to live in… and had made the dinner reservation weeks ago.

 

Unfortunately, the disturbed guest never stuck around for that explanation. And it wasn’t clear why he was eating at the Crown Grille alone, in the first place. But it was a topic that kept coming up over dinner, once David sat us at a nice table separated from the general fray (and those wearing athletic gear) in a quiet dining nook.

 

Food was okay at Crown Grille. Definitely a step up from the prime rib I’d had in the main dining room the night before. But was it still worth the 29$ per-person upcharge? That debate rages on.

 

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I should mention that we used our 150 minutes of free internet time (I think that comes with being Platinum level) to supply a regular stream of snaps to our Winks Cruises Snapchat channel. We found the internet was reasonably speedy - with our chief complaint being that the Wi-Fi signal was a bit weak in our stateroom where we’d occasionally get disconnected while trying to post.

 

We also made use of the Princess At Sea app, which let Mrs. Winks and I communicate by text messages while on board, without eating up any of our Internet minutes. That was handy, especially on sea days when we would go our separate ways and then wonder where each other was at.

 

 

Coming up: Our Amber Cove stop is cut short due to weather - and other ways we had to roll with the punches.

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GlamorousGirl

GlamorousGirl

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We also had dinner at Crown Grille on formal night. Unfortunately, for us the service and food were actually worse than the main dining room. My lobster was rubbery and my husband's steak was dry. Our waitress kept disappearing for very long periods of time, and was very slow with service. I can forgive this though because of how well everything else went on our cruise, but I won't be as quick to reserve the Crown Grill next time. Unfortunately our vow renewal photos ended up getting rushed for the dinner reservation which I didn't like either - I had made a reservation originally that turned out to be during the time the Captain wanted to do vows. So guest services changed our reservation for an hour later... no where near enough time to get our photos. So I was literally running the decks in my high heels trying not to let my agitation from being rushed show in my photos. I wish they had been more aware of how long the photos would take and made the reservation for later or a different night. Luckily, the photos came out absolutely amazing. The photographer and videographer both did an awesome job - and since I do not consider myself photogenic (and was agitated, as I mentioned, to boot) I was really impressed. We were just going to get the one that comes with the package and skip the rest but they did such a good job we ended up buying everything! Another thing that bugged us were the "Congratulations" signs on other rooms' doors of people who had "cheaper" packages than us like the anniversary package. How could they have overlooked us, with our Deluxe Vow Renewal package ($500)? Oh well. Despite these problems I still had the time of my life, even if everything wasn't perfect.

 

Your embarkation description was spot-on. We spent half an hour in the wrong line before someone told us (we were in the preferred line and didn't know it). By the time we moved to the other line we were behind a lot of people we got there before! We weren't too far back in the line because we got there so early, but the line just stood completely still for about 2 hours so it didn't matter! I was told it was customs' fault not Princess. I'm going to try and avoid the Ft. Lauderdale port in the future, and have an intense dislike of customs after this experience.

 

Looking forward to your Amber Cove post. We were very disappointed that the visit to port was cut short but since neither of us is an expert on sailing (by any stretch!) I have to take their word for it when they say it was necessary due to weather conditions. Really enjoyed Puerto Plata though and decided it is definitely a port we'd like to visit again in the future (which will help make up for lost time!) Thanks again for posting!

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JF - retired RRT

JF - retired RRT

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Following your review.

Am now on the Crown.

We also had dinner at the Crown Grille. Unlike before where you can order any steak and lobster, there is now a limit of only one main course, and any additional has a charge of $10.

Bummer!:(

We were on the Crown in Nov/Dec 2016 and you had to order the lobster as a second main, but there was no additional charge.

Sounds like this is becoming a "new thing". On a "live from" on Majesty, the OP noted that several menus in specialty restaurants only allow one main without an additional charge.

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floridalover5623

floridalover5623

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Following your review.

Am now on the Crown.

We also had dinner at the Crown Grille. Unlike before where you can order any steak and lobster, there is now a limit of only one main course, and any additional has a charge of $10.

 

Sent from my SGH-M919 using Forums mobile app

Sorry to hear that. Looks like they're cutting back everywhere. :mad:

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Mrs. Winks

Mrs. Winks

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Love your posts! Wondering if you had any soot problems on your balcony.

 

We love the aft cabins on the this class (Grand Class) of ship and have booked the aft Vista Suite several times before and have never had a soot issue. The only time we experienced soot on our aft balcony was on the Regal. It was quite bad, however, our room attendant was diligent in cleaning the balcony every day minimizing the impact. I hope that helps!

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myfuzzy

myfuzzy

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We were also on this cruise and so far this review is spot on, only we are not suite/elite, only plain platinum. We did the crown grill as well, only on Friday the last night, and we can concur, the same low quality food and service, my filet was over cooked, but as the server was taking my DH's lobster out of the shell, she noticed and took it back. She should have done the same thing with the lobster, we have had better meals at Longhorn for less than the 29.00. How or where is it stated, when did it start....the one entree per person, I missed that memo.

 

Oh, I forgot to add, at the Crown Grill, we were over fed with the TWO spoons of mashed potatoes and spinach with our entrees, did they cut back on the family style sides too?

Edited by myfuzzy
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CruzinNoony

CruzinNoony

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Following your review.

Am now on the Crown.

We also had dinner at the Crown Grille. Unlike before where you can order any steak and lobster, there is now a limit of only one main course, and any additional has a charge of $10.

 

Sent from my SGH-M919 using Forums mobile app

 

Who is your cruise director? We embark next Saturday and I am looking forward to having Paul Chandler-Burns as our CD. I'm wondering if he made it from the Ruby to the Crown for your cruise.

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socmft

socmft

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We love the aft cabins on the this class (Grand Class) of ship and have booked the aft Vista Suite several times before and have never had a soot issue. The only time we experienced soot on our aft balcony was on the Regal. It was quite bad, however, our room attendant was diligent in cleaning the balcony every day minimizing the impact. I hope that helps!

 

Yes - thanks very much!

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Mrs. Winks

Mrs. Winks

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Who is your cruise director? We embark next Saturday and I am looking forward to having Paul Chandler-Burns as our CD. I'm wondering if he made it from the Ruby to the Crown for your cruise.

 

Two weeks ago it was David Garcia.

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