We booked back to back cruises, first the repositioning cruise from San Francisco and the follow-on circumnavigation of Australia and New Zealand. We had the same cabin for both cruises but the second 33 days were very different from the first 27 days.

Embarkation in San Francisco was held up 3 hours because the ship had been in a 10 day rehab and was still off loading trash. The port in San Francisco is in dire need of updating if they want to increase cruise ship traffic. There is no place to wait inside the terminal, you have to stand outside on the sidewalk. No fun if it is raining. You must tip the local porters to take your bags to the ship. Australian passengers were having a real hard time with this because they don't tip.

Cabin - We had a balcony cabin across from the aft elevators, starboard, Baja Deck. We were a little worried about traffic noise from the elevators but it really was not much of a problem. We could smell garlic and onions and a noxious fume mainly at night. After a couple weeks of this we mentioned the noxious fume was causing headaches to our room steward. He said he would tell his supervisor and it seemed to go away for the most part. The only other issue we had was the air conditioning went out but was repaired within 2 hours. The cabins on Sea Princess are slightly smaller than other Princess ships. We did notice that Shampoo is now attached to the shower in a pump bottle. We don't know if it is just the Sea Princess or a change for the entire line because in the spring on Emerald Princess we were still getting individual shampoo bottles. Read more