We are fairly new to the cruising game but have taken 2 cruises previously, both on Royal Caribbean. One Alaska cruise on the Radiance of the Seas and One Queensland Cruise on the Rhapsody of the seas. We absolutely loved both of these and would normally stick with what we know, but in the interest of of keeping our options open for future cruises, we took advantage of the 2 day repositioning cruise on the Dawn Princess from Melbourne to Sydney.

I will try to keep a logical progression to this but a haven't done this before so please excuse me if it seems a bit disjointed.

So from the beginning. Embarkation: the facilities at Princes Pier in Melbourne are not really suited to mass movements of people. The cruise documents suggested to turn up after 2pm to board as this would not be as busy. Every single passenger took this advice as the queues snaked back quite a way and it took about 30 minutes to get to the check in desk, and then after check in another 25 minutes to get to the security check point. This was not helped any by the fact that another ship, the Pacific Sun was also boarding at the same time, it was wall to wall people. Read more