Princess Cruise line is in a state of marked decline. I have taken more than 20 cruises on their ships, and the quality of their current service and product is noticeably worse than that of Cruise Lines like NCL and RCL whom Princess has traditionally seen themselves as being a cut above.
The problems take 2 primary forms. The personnel are increasingly poorly trained, and the corporation has decided to nickle and dime passengers at every opportunity. I am sure the problems would not be noticeable to relatively new cruisers because they have no standard for comparison. They would not realize that they could have gotten more for less at another cruise line.
First, the issue of poor training. On each of the Princess ships I have been on recently there are certainly a number of high quality personnel who are trying to do the best they can. But cabin stewards now for example are required to take care of many more cabins than they can effectively service. One of the most important services for cruisers new to a particular part of the world is the qualuity of the port advice. On all 3 Princess ships I was on this last year, the person giving advice was well-meaning enough, but flat out did not know as much about the ports as would be known by a casual reader of Fodors. I once asked one of them for port information about the next port. The answer: "Oh, I wouldn't know. I don't have my notes with me." We would often find that the information we had been given was flat out wrong. Had the person giving the advice simply walked off the boat and looked around for a couple of hours she could have avoided the kind of misrepresentations she was providing.