We flew into Melbourne Airport to board the Golden Princess. We arrived at the airport at 11 am. Instead of taking the usual taxi or shuttle bus we decided to experiment with public transport as we had ample time before the ship departed and before our allocated boarding time. We were two adults and two children 5 and 8 years old. In the terminal you can purchase a myki card that has $10 credit for adults and $5 for children. We only needed the children's one as we already had the adult from a previous visit. We then walked to the end of the terminal buildings to board a bus to Broadmeadows train station. We then took a train to Southern Cross Station (formerly Spencer St) and then the 109 tram to the Port of Melbourne. The entire journey was just over 1:30h long and only cost us about $12 in total.

We walked to the pier and dropped of our bags before taking the escalator up to the terminal. Check in went smooth and we were on the ship within 30 minutes.

On arrival in our cabin we had some welcome surprise gifts. One was a dinner package with a bottle of wine from our travel agent and Princess gave us additional OBC and because we are now Elite we also had mini bar set up and free wine tasting and lots of other things. Princess certainly has a very good loyalty program and if you have cruised with P&O Australia those cruises count towards your total Princess tally. I need to say that we only travelled in steerage, it was not like we had a suite or balcony cabin, we had an inside quad. Read more