Royal Princess Review
Manage your expectations and you will have a great time!
Rating by category
Additional details
DW and myself have been cruising for a number of years, normally we take one or two cruises per year. I'd call us "opportunistic cruisers" because we live in Florida with easy access to three ports, and we normally book on the spur of the moment and just a few weeks before departure.
We've found that we enjoy cruises more when we go with low expectations, treating each time as a new vacation experience rather than as a desire (and expectation) to be pampered. As it turns out this experience was way better than we expected - perhaps as good a cruise as we've had in the past few years.
We'd previously cruised on the Caribbean Princess and this time thought that we'd give the larger Royal Princess a try because of the great itinerary - we booked a guaranteed unobstructed balcony and got a small upgrade to a deluxe balcony cabin. No complaints there. See more about our cabin in the Cabin Review.
Cabin Review
Deluxe Balcony
The deluxe balcony cabin (class DB, Dolphin Deck 9) was bigger than we'd been led to expect, and bigger than most outside view cabins that we've had on other ships. No problem for two people. Our cabin steward "Freddie" was great; one of the best stewards we've ever had. He made an effort to introduce himself within a few minutes of us entering the cabin, and he keep our cabin as neat as a pin the entire time we were there. We asked for terry cloth bathrobes and he had them for us the first night.
There was a surprising amount of drawer space and a huge closet with more than enough supplied hangers for two on a 10-day trip. Plaudits to Princess for the storage space!
The bathroom was large enough, don't care for the stick-to-you plastic shower curtains but at least they were clean and somewhat hygienic appearing. The supplied shower gel and shampoo/conditioner were of good quality.
The TV channels were marginally OK, but OTOH we don't go on a cruise to watch TV. Having said that, we would like to have two additional TV channels available, something like CNN for general news and the Weather Channel for weather. There really isn't much need to provide both MSNBC and CNBC, one financial new channel would be enough.