I booked a room on the Golden Princess to go and see Alaska with my parents. We’re very low key people who were very much looking forward to time in one of the last great frontiers left.

Alaska is amazing and an experience everyone should have. We did a kayaking excursion in Juneau through a company called Beyond Alaska. They were fantastic and our guide (Hannah) was amazing. We were really able to get out into nature. Skagway is very nice but small; so I would definitely recommend booking or planning something else to do other than walk around the town. We did the horseback riding excursion through Princess. The company they work with is extremely nice and professional. This was a great experience as well. Ketchikan is wonderful although we would’ve liked more time there. There are no words for how beautiful Glacier Bay is. If you like seafood and good beer, there are amazing restaurants all over the ports in Alaska and the further you walk from the cruise ships the better they get. Seattle is also a wonderful city to visit. We planned to spend extra time there after the cruise and were very happy we did. It’s a very walkable city and the food and people are amazing.

I strongly recommend making a trip to Alaska, but I would just as strongly recommend avoiding the Golden Princess. This is the most inefficient cruise ship I (or my parents who were with me and veterans of even more cruises than I’ve been on) have ever seen. Here are just a few examples. While at port in Skagway, we were stuck in line to board the ship for 40 minutes because they had only set up one ramp for passage on and off the ship. This meant that every time someone in a wheel chair had to get on or off the boat they had to stop the line both ways to accommodate. What made this galling was that they were in the process, while we were waiting in line, of opening up another ramp which means they could’ve done that when we docked at 6 am that morning instead of at 1 pm and avoided the trouble of long lines to begin with. In Ketchikan we also witnessed a line as long as the length of the cruise ship to board at 11:30 am when we were told to report back. This time we sat across from the ship having coffee and just waiting for the line to reach a normal length. We were watching and waiting for over 40 minutes. On most days the signs saying what level the disembarkation ramps were on were incorrect. The lines at the Horizon Court Buffet are as bad as everyone says and the food is pretty awful. The food elsewhere on the ship is decent (nothing super special but nothing to complain about either). Disembarkation upon our return to Seattle was also handled poorly. Passengers are told to be out of their rooms by 8 am and wait around in lobbies until they are called to leave the boat. When we arrived at our spot they were already 2 groups and probably several hours behind. You would think if you were going to make people sit around that long you would at least have water and coffee out in the holding areas but that was not the case. However, while they state in the disembarkation pamphlet that customs will not let you through until your group is called, we were able to just walk off the boat and through customs without issue even though we hadn't been called. Who knows how long we would have been waiting had we waited for Princess to tell us we could leave. In general, a little more thought and planning on the boat by the management (especially when the cruise has been doing the same route all summer) would go a long way towards making their passengers feel more important and welcome. Read more