First let me give you the positive aspects of this cruise. The itinerary is fantastic, an equal amount of time at sea and exposure to different cultures within Southeast Asia. And if you are a shopper, you could definitely shop until you drop. For a cruise of this length we booked a mini-suite, giving us that all important extra bit of space which we both appreciated while on the ship for over 16 days. Our room steward was great, quickly catching on to our patterns and always willing to do the room around our schedule, not his. As in previous cruises with Princess, we bought coffee cards, entitling us do specialty coffees at the Plaza coffee bar and the young woman working in that area was more than willing to experiment for me, making me a London Fog (not on the menu). The comedians on board were fair to great (the ventriloquist was great).

The negatives unfortunately were numerous. We knew that this was a large ship that would have to dock at container terminals at most destinations thanks to other postings on Cruise Critic. What didn't come through the postings was just how inconvenient this made getting to anywhere, using up much of the precious shore time. Whether people were booked with an organized excursion or independently going ashore didn't seem to make much difference in the time delay. We did both and found the excuses and lack of communication from staff very frustrating. In Shanghai, we actually spent well over 90 minutes waiting to disembark to get to our tour, cutting the tour short by over one hour. And that was with an extension of time provided by the Chinese officials for us to leave port. If you had decided to stay on board to relax, the environs were not really conducive to that as the ports were working container terminals (i.e read noisy and smelly). Princess still has not made the casinos smoke free despite the fact that even in Vegas the casinos are smoke free.

Probably our biggest disappointment was in the food service. The buffet was poorly organized. The only truly 'hot' food I found was the soups. Generally I would grade the buffet a 2 out of 5 and the dining rooms a 3 out of 5. After being on other Princess ships, the food was definitely disappointing. As well the buffet seemed poorly set up, causing a lot of problems with congestion in the food service areas. There was no 'occupied' marking system as we have had on other Princess cruise ships. We didn't find out until 2 days before the end of the cruise that the omelette station was at the Trident Grill (the other end of the Lido Deck from the rest of the morning breakfast buffet). Read more