We chose Royal Princess for our Canada & New England cruise because it was a new ship and we wanted to try it. As Platinum cruisers we had been on most of the others. The cruise experience was disappointing, from the lack of oceanview staterooms, to the very slow elevators, to the lack of anytime dining. We dislike interior cabins but were unwilling to pay triple the price for a balcony for such a short cruise.

The Royal has more passengers than most of their other ships but the same number of elevators. These elevators are also very slow with the annoying habit of stopping at every deck regardless of whether anyone was waiting or not. Also the doors wouldn't close if anyone pushed the elevator button while they were still open. When you have 40 or 50 frustrated people waiting outside the theater for an elevator, there's a lot of button pushing. After the elevator door opened and closed a few times without moving, eventually someone stuck their head out and yelled "Take your finger off the *** button" and the elevator finally moved. By the time the cruise was over, most people had learned that keeping their finger off the button until the doors closed really did speed things up.

We prefer Anytime Dining as we enjoy shipboard activities and often don't want to cut an activity short to rush back to change for dinner. On Royal princess there was no anytime dining. Two of the three dining rooms were reserved for set seating and the third was supposed to be anytime, but it was anything but! Lineups started around 4:30 and by 5:15 the dining room was full. As dinner usually takes about two hours, that meant no more openings until 7:15. If you came anytime after 5:15 or 5:30 you got a pager and were told to wait in one of the public rooms. By 6 pm the Piazza was filled with impatient diners holding pagers and fending off waiters every few minutes who asked if they wanted to order a drink. For the next hour until pagers started going off, no one who actually wanted to sit and have a drink could get near the place. On most cruises when you sit down to dinner with a stranger, the first question is usually "Where are you from?". On this one it was "How long did you wait with your pager?" Read more