Well where do I start, so it was decided that we that we would venture into the cruising world in our retirement, so we booked the cruise between the 5th of March and the 18th of March 2017 to New Zealand departing from Melbourne on the Golden Princess. Since this was our maiden voyage we decided to take a suite with a balcony, so we ended up getting a mini-suite as this was all that was available at the time, us thinking that we had full run of the ship. Let me first say that the service of the Gull bus from Geelong to the Melbourne Docks and return was excellent.

Once on-board the ship and in our mini-suite D324 we notices at first glance that the carpet along the edge to the balcony had come away and was a tripping hazard, at first we thought of letting it go as it was the end of one cruise and the start of another but instead we mentioned it to our cabin steward. After the ship disembarked we found out that we were heading into a storm that was 1 point off a hurricane and the ship’s captain took us out anyway, so with that said we were told that there was going to be rough weather ahead all deck activities were mainly cancelled in fact we had rough weather for 10 days out off the 13 days of the cruise we managed to land in only 3 ports out of the 6 that we paid for, and the cabin balcony looked great but we were not able to use it until the last 2 days without being blown away.

The following morning we noticed that half of our black-out curtains were shredded as if someone had been smoking in the room and used the curtains to butt out the cigarettes, there was also water running down our walls and circular wet patch at the foot of the bed which was also brought to the attention of our cabin steward and the service department. While we were at breakfast they had come to the room, removed the right black out curtain and left, This was replaced the following day but the top of the wet patch at the end of the bed had been dried but not underneath so every time you went to bed and you forgot in the dark where the patch was you ended up with a wet foot. Read more