We just returned from a cruise on the new Ruby. We are experienced cruisers, having traveled several times on other lines, this was our first Princess Cruise. I won't spend a lot of time on the ship, because it is brand new, and it is beautiful as you expect. We thought the rooms were very well laid out, and very convenient to use. We had the balcony upgrade category on deck 10. Be aware, everyone above you can look right down on your balcony on this ship, as I believe is true on other Princess ships as well. Embarkation was the best ever, we were through the line in 30 minutes tops. The cabin steward immediately came to our room and introduced himself as soon as we arrived. We are generally very easy going and go with the flow whenever we travel, so the criticism in this review we think is well deserved. We also talked to many people that we met on board, and everyone had the same complaints, so Princess needs to pay attention to this. One other thing before I go on - we had reservations about traveling Princess because we heard it is an 'older' crowd. We are in the 45 to 50 age range, and we felt that at least half the people on board were younger. As a matter of fact we saw very few people that were older - they seemed to be either 20s to 30s or our age range. Service on board was very good, but fairly 'cold'. If you like to cruise and get to know your cabin steward and other service personnel, this did not happen on this cruise. We met the cabin steward when we checked in, then we paged him the next day because we wanted four towels in our room instead of two. We had to ask twice, and after that we always had four towels, but we literally never saw him again. We thought he was avoiding us because we asked for more towels, and on previous cruises we have gotten friendly with the cabin workers, not this time. The same could be said for service all over the ship. We did traditional dining at 8:15. The waiter was very friendly, but the service from the kitchen was awful. We wasted so much time just waiting for food to be brought out it was ridiculous. Frequently, we wanted to see a show or participate in an activity after dinner and we were late. We thought the shows that we did see were excellent by other cruise standards, this was a plus on the ship. We also found that while this was one of the dullest crowds we've ever cruised with. Frequently, we would go to one of the clubs, casino, bars, etc at 10:00 PM and there would be at the most 50 people there. SO, if you are cruising this ship, do not worry about the age range, but if you want to be social and dance and meet people on the ship - forget it - they all seemed to go to bed by 10:00 PM. This seemed to be the perfect cruise for honeymooners that would like to be alone, or people that just want to cruise and not be social.

But the worst thing of all was the food. We kept hoping it would get better. We did not eat in any of the speciality restaurants, and stuck with the traditional dining, buffet, etc. The room service, pizza, burgers, were about par with all other lines. However, the lunch buffets and dinner options were horrible. The desserts were horrible. I cannot stress enough how bad the food was. We kept waiting for it to get better. We talked to everyone we met, and they all agreed. I don't know if Princess is pushing for people to pay extra to eat in the speciality restaurants or not, but if you are a person that does not want to pay extra and expects the typical 'great food, we're gaining weight, we need to stop eating' kind of cruise, skip this cruise line. We are two individuals with totally different eating preferences, and neither one of us could find anything we liked. Everything was just mediocre. We were so glad to get off the ship and looked forward to getting something decent to eat. In summary, we will never cruise Princess again because of the food. We aren't sure if this is true across the board for Princess, but we're not taking another chance.