We chose this cruise (our second princess Japanese cruise) so we could meet up with UK friends and introduce them to Japan as a holiday destination, so the ports we visited were important to the overall experience, and thank goodness they turned out to be excellent as there were a lot of niggles on this cruise.

So the good things, the food was heaps better than the Royal Caribbean cruise we did last year, service excellent both at the bars and in the restaurant, our cabin steward was lovely, embarkation and exiting the ship was super easy due to the astonishing ability of the Japanese to do things swiftly and efficiently.

So what was wrong, here's the list, we arrived to find that our friends were not seated with us on our table as we (and they) had requested when we made the reservation, in fact they weren't even in the same restaurant, so we wasted countless precious hours chasing the maitre d around the ship to enable this to be sorted, we had asked to be on a big table to enable us to meet people too but that wasn't possible which was a shame , mid week we were joined by a Scottish couple which was nice. Read more