The Island Princess is an absolutely amazing ship. It is beautiful and clean and very charming. We found the trip to Whittier from the Anchorage airport to be slightly painful. The Princess representatives @the airport were clueless. We got multiple answers to our questions. Basically - they hold you either at the airport or at the convention center in downtown Anchorage till around noon or 12:30. So no one is able to leave for the ship earlier than this. We were misled to believe that if you arrived at the airport earlier in the day-they would send a bus as soon as it fills up. This is not the case and we ended up waiting at the airport for about 2 hours.

Then we were told that we would make the 2:30 tunnel into Whittier. This was a mess. There were about 10 Princess cruise buses in that 2:30 tunnel time lined up. Therefore, we waited-waited-waited and finally went thru the tunnel and then waited-waited-waited to be dropped off at the port. Then we were in a line about 75 people deep. The entire process took over 2.5 hours. It was very frustrating.

Our cabin C230 on Deck 10 Caribe was fantastic. It was forward and quiet. I strongly recommend going for a balcony mini-suite. The bathroom is huge compared to the regular rooms. If you have 3 or 4 people in your party- it would be a perfect size. I am highly disappointed in Princess for this sail. I do not agree with the automatic gratuity being added to your account. My husband and I did the open seating and found the staff to be unhelpful and merely efficient. The normal atmosphere that you expect from a waitstaff was not there. It is my belief that since they knew they would be tipped- their incentive to provide exceptional service was not there. As it was - we adjusted the tips on the last night. We gave to those that we felt appeared to give more service and did not allow the automatic gratuity to hit the account. I hope Princess revisits this in the future- we voiced our opinions as did multiple persons around us. Read more