Crown Princess Review
Crown Princess 1/26 to 2/02 - Solid, Not Perfect, Experience
Rating by category
Additional details
Background: My wife and I (early 50's) took a 7 day Western Caribbean cruise, out of Galveston, on the Crown Princess. The voyage took place January 26th through February 2nd. This is the 11th cruise for my wife and I, and our second with Princess. We have also cruised with Carnival (7 times), Royal Caribbean (once), and Celebrity (once).
Embarkation: We drove down to Galveston, on Saturday, the day of the cruise, and experienced virtually no traffic, arriving around 10:30 A.M. I had booked (and paid online for) parking with Lighthouse Parking. They are $50 for the seven days, versus $65 for the Port Authority parking. They took us, and our luggage, directly to the cruise terminal where a porter took it away. I would definitely recommend their service. We entered the terminal at 10:40 and within 15 minutes we had been fully processed, and were given a Group #1 boarding pass. We had to wait, in a seating area, for an hour before we were finally allowed to board. They said they were running about 40 minutes behind, because there was a lack of customs agents causing the prior cruise debarkation to be behind. No big deal. We ended up having lunch at 12:15 P.M., after dropping off our carry-on luggage in our room.
Ship: The ship is extremely large (114,000 tons) and it can be quite confusing initially. The most important thing to remember is that decks 7 (Promenade), and 15 (Lido) go from one end of the ship to another. The others have a roadblock somewhere that may force you to go up or down to go around them. The ship, while slightly worn in a few areas, was in great shape. I won't go into the specifics of ship, since they can be seen in the brochure, and are spelled out in so many other reviews..
Cabin Review
Oceanview (obstructed view)
We had an obstructed view cabin (Category FF) on the Emerald deck. Our cabin number was E415 and it is exactly in the middle of the ship, directly above the shops. It is right next to the middle elevators, but we didn't hear any noise from the elevators or people waiting for them. Even though the cabin is supposed to have a "fully" obstructed view, that was really not the case. We had ZERO obstruction outside our window, unless you were on top of the window and looked down. Then, you could see a landing and some of the Promenade deck. We had no problems seeing the water below or the islands from our window. A big "knock" against this room was that at random times there would be a LOUD metal clanging coming from outside. It happened quite a bit in the early morning and was quite disturbing. Also, we had the air conditioning set to the lowest level throughout the cruise, and mid-day the temperature was a bit warmer than we would have liked. Other times it was comfortable, but you could never really say it ever got cold in the room. The room was laid out well, and we had plenty of storage space. I definitely liked the large space to hang things up. The bed was definitely firm as stated by many, and we had a hard time getting restful sleep. The bathroom was extremely well laid out, but the shower was tiny. I'm a pretty big guy and it was definitely claustrophobic. Plus, the shower head was at my neck level, so I had to do a limbo-like act to wash my hair. The room had a refrigerator in which we stored our own stash.