I'm 25 years old and went on this cruise with my family on Sun Princess the Jan 8-18, 2005. The ship looks great still for being 10 years old. Food was not that good in the dining room. The buffet was pretty good. Most of the crew were not too nice. The Anytime Dining was not good. The service was very bad. We had waiters refusing to let our steaks be well done, we had another waiter pressuring us to get alcoholic drinks after saying no twice then got a snotty remark back. The hot dog guy at the Terrace grill was very rude. The first day my sister asked if she could get Sauerkraut on her hot dog and he jumped at her and said in a mean sarcastic voice "yes miss!"
Our ship did have people sick with the Norwalk Virus. The first day was fine, but the 2nd day of the cruise we could not serve ourselves at the buffet. We could not even touch the salt and pepper or the Sweet 'n Low for our ice teas. Later that day we got a letter in our room informing us that some passengers have the Norwalk virus and explained how to prevent it. The Captain also talked about it the next day. It was pretty bad on the ship. The crew was pissed off since they had to do everything for us. It was a big pain not being able to touch anything. Three days into the cruise the cabin across from us got the Norwalk and workers would come in everyday in special protection suits with masks and clean and spray the rooms down. They did that every day. Also, the entire ship was always being sprayed with some kind of spray. The cabin next to us also got the Norwalk virus and you could hear them flushing the toilet 50 times a day for at least 4 days. We had 4 cabins just in our area with Norwalk virus. The cabin that had it bad next to us was B224 and B207. In the buffet area, you had to wait a long time for a table until it was sanitized. There was not enough help since the crew had to get everything for us. Sometimes you would wait 4 minutes for an ice tea. They also shut down one side for the buffet since there was not much help. So you had longer lines.
My sister heard that if someone vomited in a certain area, that they would quarantine the entire area and everyone inside. So if that happened around us, we would run out like hell. The cabin next to us was not able to go out at all since they had the virus. We saw a lot of doctors going into people rooms so when we saw that we would run away. Not too many people knew what was going on. Or the crew was trying to keep it a secret. A lot of crew members were very rude and treated us like all of us had the plague.