A little background on me/us; I am 52, DH is 57, and this was our 19th cruise, our 12th time on Princess. Other cruises have been on Carnival (4), and one each on HAL, RCCL, and NCL.

Our main reason to book this cruise was to escape an unusually brutal winter in the mid-Atlantic. Also, we had done the 10-Eastern Caribbean cruise (Barbados, St. Lucia, Antigua, St. Kitts, & St. Thomas) 5-years ago, and wanted to do the Southern Caribbean 10-day before the Emerald is redeployed to Houston, TX during the winter months. Our ports of call were: Aruba, Bonaire, Grenada, Dominica, and St. Thomas.

When we had first sailed on the Emerald 5-years ago she was still a fairly new, and she had the new ship look and feel. I was curious after 5-years how well she had held up. Overall I thought she looked pretty good. The ship was clean, and was well maintained. There were a few areas where varnish needed to be reapplied to handrails, and there were some noticeably big paint chips on the metal loungers in the Sanctuary, but overall she looked good. Read more