Crown Princess Review
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Crown Princess 2/24/07-3/3/07 Classic Southern Caribbean
It is a long way from San Jose, California to San Juan so we flew in a day early and arrived at SJU at about 10:45pm. We made our own air arrangements with AA at pretty good rates. Taxis in SJU are easy. There's a small orange booth outside baggage claim. Tell them where you are headed and they will write down a fixed price that you can give the driver. Then you wait in line for the actual taxi. We stayed at the Sheraton Old San Juan so the taxi was $28 for 2, 4 bags including tip. By the way, everyone in San Juan speaks excellent English. Language is a non-issue. We are Starwood Preferred Guests and booked the hotel using starpoints. We were upgraded to a suite. I have no idea why. My only regret is that we stayed less than a day so didn't get to really enjoy it. The room was clean and looked recently renovated, new furniture etc. In the morning our French balcony opened to a beautiful view of the harbor and the cruise ships. The Sheraton is a 5 minute walk to Pier 4 where the Crown is docked. I would definitely recommend this hotel to others for convenience and location.
We spent Saturday morning walking around Old San Juan. I really like this area. We walked to the big fort on the point and spent an hour and a half there. Then we walked around the little narrow streets looking into shops and checking restaurant menus. I could easily spend a couple of days in this area just eating and shopping. Lots of nice things here, but because it was our first day we didn't actually buy anything. We had checked out of the Sheraton and had our bags stored with the bell captain before our walk. One observation I'll make about the hotel is that there are not enough elevators. It took 20 minutes to get one and we had to take it up to the top floor and then ride it down to the lobby. The lobby was kind of a zoo also between cruise people checking out and new cruise people just off the ships checking in. Only 2 ships were in port so I can't imagine what it's like with a full dock. Bottom line, give yourself plenty of time to get downstairs and check out. We did and while we were surprised at the activity we were not stressed about it.