After hearing a lots of good things about Princess, specially after 4 previous trips by my father, we decided to go for an Alaska tour.Arrival to the ship dock is really easy. I prearranged round trip in a shared van from Seattle-Tacoma airport from Shuttle Express, information obtained after researching the official airport website. It was really a nice service as well as fairly reasonable. As I book a month ahead of the time, it was 47 dollars for 6 people each way, and they provide child seats!Embarcation to the ship was simple. I believe every cruise line would attempt to make it painless.The overall ship appearance is really nice. Staterooms are clean, as this ship just underwent refurbishing, the overall look of this ship does appear much more modern than is 2001 original build date. The international cafe and Piazza are really attractive as well. As matter of fact that is somewhere I spent a great portion of my time.Unfortunately, some disappointing preformances started to be shown soon after our boarding. According the the information booklet, we could ask for bathrobes and pool towels from our room steward. At first I called the front desk asking for it, then 20 minutes later I made one more call. It was followed by another 2 pages to the steward. It took a total of 90 minutes , 6 calls to the front desk, and 2 pages to the room steward from the beginning of the request until the towels were delivered on May 10, 17:45. During this time, there was absolutely no answer to the pages, and noone really apologized( except for the mechanical response of "we are sorry, we will contact the desk supervisor who will personally deliver the bathrobes", that sounded so automatic that no one fells for any real true concern). A tour to the rest of the ship, we sadly discovered that many of the promised attractions were not ready for usage. Many areas of the ship were cordoned off and building materials left on the spot denoting that the ship's "upgrades" were not completed by the time we sailed. This unfortunate fact will come to a terrible resolution later on. One example, the virtual golf simulator was never completed through out the entire trip.As regarding to the food in dining room in general, is a hit or miss. My only other comparison was Carnival Elation. I was a really let down in general during this trip. I thought that given the market segmentation between Princess and Carnival, with this one oriented to more mature and probably wealthier customer base, the food would be much better. That is totally not the case. I did not enjoy the "gourmet" food as primised.Saying that on board food is a totally lost cause is not fair either. The Horizon Buffet food was indeed a notch better than lido buffet of the Carnival, but I always thought that buffet is something you eat when survival is the only main objective of the meal. It would have been better to spend more time and energy at improving the general cuisine.Our experience on the dinining room let us to believe that may be the only way to try for real gourmet food was to cough up 15-20 dollar cover charge per person for the specialty restaurants. So we reserved for the Sterling Steakhouse on May 14, 2009. It was a desaster. The waiter kept on stuttering about each steak cut as a great and very tender cut, but was not really able to give convincing argument for pro and conts of each cut, and he confused the order for 3 people on the same party. We were 4 adult and two children, how hard was it to get confused? The actual restaurant was no where to be found on the ship, it turned about that a section of buffet was cordoned separately and declared" Steakhouse". After the steaks arrive eventually, everything was overcooked. Medium became medium well, medium well became well done, non of the steaks appeared to have gone through any aging process. We were told that the steaks were made in the same general kitchen so the cook could not really track each steak to its perferred timing. Only steaks were available, were are the port chops? Lobster tail? what about rack of lamp? By the way, 2 out of 4 soups on the preprinted menu were not available either. We were offered some tomatoe soup as the buffet or general dinining room.At end of the not very happy meal, we got the same coffee from the general area, which either was directly supplied by Safeway as safeway brand, or came from the diesel engine room of this great 109K ton ship as area to roast beans. And the dessert? Same as general standard dinining room issue, my heart was broken. I thought that a restaurant that requires cover charge would do much better than this. Princess should really issue official apologies for launching a steakhouse without neither a good steak nor a actual "house". We subsequently cancelled our reservation for Sabatini  Italian restaurant for the following day as soon as possible. Being tricked once was our bad. Repeating the same mistake twice, would be come a terrific stupiditidy. And finally, the day of make our voice heard, I asked for the feedback survey on May 14, I was told it would be made available on the last cruise day for each stateroom. No, we did have have the paper. I approached the front desk on May 15, last night of the cruise trip, and I was told that the ship ran out of supplies for the feedback forms. I was told by a fellow passenger that the actual "feedback" forms overflowed the collecting box. Too many passenger needed to be heard. So, I borrowed a disgusted fellow passenger's form and fillled it anyway, I suspect that my feedback form was left out on purpose.Has anyone tried to contact Princess to voice those similar complaints? I tried. Try navigate Princess website. I would applaude your luck if you get sucessful.Despite all these misgivings, I still believe that the this ship might just be an outlier rather than norm, Princess as a brand cannot survive with the same performance across board.  The hospitality and restaurant manager of this ship may just have been the worse of the entire team. May be when the departure of current management of the ship is heard, Golden Princess will have a true shot at gaining back my interest. It is a beautiful ship, just needs to be ran tighter.