Star Princess Review
Rating by category
Additional details
OVERALL SUMMARY OF CRUISE: Excellent service, great cabin, good food, so-so shore excursions (especially the organization of ship-sponsored shore excursion waiting areas and gangway queues). Will not hesitate to come back to Princess, although on a different ship. Would rely less on ship-sponsored shore excursions in the future in favour of taking the shuttle into ports or taking independent shore excursions.
It's really too bad that I couldn't rate the cruise overall as 4+, because while the ship-sponsored shore excursions left a slightly bitter taste in my mouth to the point of making the cruise experience undeserving of a 5... I still think that it was excellent and deserved more than the 4 that I put on paper.
Now that I got the summary out of the way--please feel free to read on if you're interested in the details. It might be approaching novel length, though, so please bear with me.
Cabin Review
Balcony
CABIN:
We stayed at Cabin B518, which was a balcony cabin at the passenger-only Baja deck located slightly behind the middle of the ship. The Baja deck was sandwiched between two other passenger-only decks (Aloha and Caribe decks), so there was very little exposure to noise compared to decks closer to public areas.
We were quite excited to have a balcony for this cruise because, for most of our cruises (except the chartered cruise on Seabourn Legend that I didn't go to), we stayed in an inside room.
Besides the obvious advantage of a full view of the ocean--which allowed us to take in the wonderful sail-in in Lisbon and the beautiful coastlines of Oslo on sailaway--we had considerably more storage space than when we were in an inside room. For starters, the closet wasn't as near the bathroom door compared to an inside room on the Star Princess. Secondly, there was an additional floor-to-ceiling storage cabinet which proved extremely handy for storing shoes. So I think we are very likely to get a balcony cabin for future cruises.
We were also fortunate enough to not live close to smokers next to or above us, so we were not subject to cigarette smoke. (While we saw an ashtray in the cabin balcony below us, we never noticed the passengers living there smoking in the balcony.)
The room was always kept impeccably clean, with towels and bathrobes promptly replaced and with the pillow chocolates provided every day.
The one flaw that I could find with the room was the third-person pullman bed, which folded up into the ceiling of the cabin during daytime. As the person who used that bed, I must say that it was about as comfortable as the bed I used when living in a university residence--the mattress seemed a little too low, and the safety railings made the bed seem cramped. As for the common complaint on the Princess CC forums that Princess's mattresses are too hard--while I did find it harder compared to other hotel beds that I've slept in, what made the situation a little different in my case is that I actually sleep on a hard mattress at home and do prefer firmer mattresses, so I'm not quite sure if requesting an egg crate would have made sleeping in the third-person bed more comfortable.