Star Princess Review

4.0 / 5.0
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The 8.8 cruise from hell!

Review for South America Cruise on Star Princess
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luvinretirement
First Time Cruiser • Age 70s

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Sail Date: Mar 2010
Cabin: Balcony
Traveled with children

We just got home from our 32 (29!) day cruise on the Star Princess that was supposed to be a dream vacation and ended up being anything but - penguins and going around Cape Horn were the reasons we booked this cruise -- the only penguins I saw were in the gift shop - we didn't go to Punta Arenas, Falkland Islands or go around the Horn -- granted Princess couldn't predict the earthquake that happened on February 27, 3 days before our sailing date, but they certainly could have handled the situation better. With all the uncertainty they should have told us to stay home and we could have rebooked at another time. But Princess, thinking of their bottom line first and not their customers, insisted that everything was on schedule and for us to get down to Santiago and the ship was leaving on March 2 as scheduled.

We had a hard time getting there but were one of the lucky ones that had been scheduled on LAN Chile airlines - we managed to be rescheduled on the only flight out of LAX on March 1 going to Santiago (our original flight was early afternoon on March 1 but we got out of LAX at 5:55 pm). We had to stop in Lima on the way for a scheduled 45 minutes stop that ended up being almost 3 hours because we had to wait for clearance in Santiago. We'd been flying for 11 hours from LAX with a 5 hour time change and we were tired when we arrived in Santiago (we left Vancouver, BC at 6:30 am on March 1st arriving in Santiago midday on March 2nd) - only to find out from Destination Management personnel (no real Princess people were there) we weren't going to the ship but to a hotel for 2 nights at $180 US per night - the ship had to leave port and anchor in the harbour because of congestion in port and the tender dock was damaged and couldn't be used - we stood in the sun for over an hour, without any water, waiting for the buses to come to take us to the hotel - at the hotel we had little information available as to what was happening - finally the evening of March 3rd there was a sign saying we'd be leaving early March 4th and check with the DMC rep to get our bus assignments.

We left the hotel at 7:00 am (breakfast was at 5:30 am - it took a couple hours to get from Santiago to Valparaiso -- we got a mini tour because they weren't ready for us at the terminal for embarkation. The embarkation process in Valpariso was a joke - over an hour in the terminal building waiting for them to start the embarkation process which looked like a free for all (they could have done a better job manually and forgotten the computers) once they figured it out our priority line moved rather quickly but we didn't get key cards but were told we'd get them onboard - we were so relieved to get on the shuttle bus to get on the ship at 11:00 am because we'd been up so early and had a very early breakfast, we were hungry, thirsty and tired -- when we arrived at the ship we didn't get our key cards handed to us but we were coralled in the Capri Restaurant - after 5 hours we finally were called to get our key cards (this was 4:00 pm) - there were trays of sandwiches and drinks brought in periodically but they were swarmed when they arrived and many people didn't get anything to eat - we rejoiced when we got our cards and went to the cabin only to find our people were already in our room - back to another area to wait for another hour for another key card - we finally got into our cabin at 6:00 pm - we bounced around in the harbour until just after 9:00 pm when we finally set sail. They kept blaming the earthquake for the disruption but they had 2 days floating in the harbour waiting for us to get onboard and they still royally screwed things up -- the mismanagement and dysfunctionality onboard had nothing to do with the earthquake because it was there the whole 29 days we were onboard.

Cabin Review

Balcony

Cabin BA

C609 has a great big balcony - lots of room for 6 people to relax. The room is the standard size but the balcony more than makes up for it.

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