First, let me start by saying that we had the most amazing trip on the Golden Princess on this fabulous 14 night sailing from Los Angeles to Hawaii. There were a couple of issues to note, as you will see in the review below.

Embarkation: We made our own travel arrangements to fly down to Los Angeles and booked a reservation with SuperShuttle to the pier. This all went very smoothly and we arrived at the port at approximately noon. Because of a norovirus alert from the previous crew, we were not allowed to board the ship as they were busy with the sanitation process and replacing some of the crew that may have gotten sick as well (at least that was the rumor in the waiting area). The port in San Pedro was pretty organized but this suffered due to the growing number of people waiting to board. As above, we are platinum members and although there was a separate seating area in which to board, it was completely full and we were on several occasions asked to move to the outside where there were several 10's of people smoking. We thought the embarkation procedures were set up very poorly, but realized that this was probably because of the delay caused by the extra cleaning. We were onboard at approximately 1:15 - 1:30 and did end up being one of the first groups to board.

Stateroom: We got into our stateroom to drop our carry on luggage. There was no extensive questioning of bringing our two bottles of wine onboard, as a matter of fact, don't think they minded how much wine you brought with you, even from the ports of call. We were extremely happy with our stateroom accommodations. We were midship on the Emerald deck, directly across from the elevators with a small lifeboat outside our window. We still have an ample amount of light in the room and a fairly decent view of the water and such. There was no issue with noise at any time during the cruise. There is ample closet space, which is great considering this was a 14 night cruise. The bed was quite comfortable, although some complaints were heard from others. The pillows and linens were quite nice. The temperature in the room was a bit hard to control without having a balcony door to open, but we chose our room carefully for the noise factor and midship down low for the sea sickness factor. We can not chosen a better room for this cruise. Our refrigerator worked like a little champ. Our room steward, Jeoffrey was amongst the best. He kept everything nice and tidy and was timely but not intrusive. Read more