We chose this 10 day holiday as it left from our home town and returned there at the end, avoiding the often horrible day of airports and flights that can ruin a holiday. Expecting a nice experience on the Star, which we'd had before, we were somewhat disappointed this time. Besides mixing up our 'confirmed' queen bed configuration and lack of robes in the room, the reservations in the Traditional Dining restaurant were also incorrect. Instead of the 'confirmed' table for two, we were shown to a table for eight. Luckily, the folks there were all nice. One little Princess cost-cutting idea was noticed by everyone at the table.......the new approach of not putting butter in a container on the table, but having the assistant-waiter dole it out one pat at a time, requiring a request for another from him if you wanted one. Talk about chintzy!

We found that the level of entertainment has dropped, with fewer big shows and more piano/singer, magician and comedian acts backed up by the good but understaffed 'orchestra'. A lot of the sounds now come from synthesized instruments on the track the musicians play along with, and the quality of the synthesized instruments is not great, with a Baritone sax on the track sounding more like a tuned chain-saw! The lovely sounds of the string trio at their feature concert in the Vista Lounge were over-amplified and distorted by the technician to the point of being painful.

The Princess shore-excursion in Los Angeles of Olvera Street, the Chinese Theatre and the Market is a waste of time and money, unless you enjoy traffic jams, circling blocks around the Chinese Theatre looking for a place to park the bus, and and then seeing endless streets of warehouses and car repair garages on the way back to the ship. This was after a US immigration processing that took a ridiculous length of time for those going on excursions but which for others took four hours in the cold immigration holding pen until every passenger on the ship had been processed before being allowed to re-board. There were people without proper clothing for the cold and others who needed their medications back on the ship. Princess gave no warning to passengers that it would take that long. (While Princess had no control over this understaffed and slow US Immigration process, they should have prepared everyone better.) Read more