My wife and I recently sailed on the transatlantic cruise from Fort Lauderdale to St. Petersburg. To sum things up we had a ball on this trip. Great cruising company, fantastic crew and a beautiful ship. But things were not perfect all the way. To contextualize the following information you should note that my wife and I are cruisers who definitely like to do our own thing in the ports we visit. At the end of this cruise we left the Royal Princess in St. Petersburg to do some independent self-organized travel through Russia and Europe.
Embarkation was all things considered handled pretty well by Princess. Due to no fault of our own we arrived at 12:30 pm, an hour earlier than our designated time so we have no complaints about the long lines. As a "preferred" customer we were ushered into "preferred" queue which funnily happened to be longer than the normal queue. We spent our time amused at the antics of some customers who thought they were more preferred than others as they attempted to queue jump. Suffice to say they weren't treated well by their fellow cruisers. Princess did extremely well getting the large numbers of cruisers through the necessary protocols and on board the ship.
The inside public areas of this ship are amazing. The aesthetic detail is a real credit to Princess. The well documented lack of stairs amidships was no problem for us as we were happy to walk forward or aft to use these stairs or lifts. It should be noted that there is an ability to move between the amidships public floors using stairs. However, most passengers tended to use the amidships lifts to move a single floor (no wonder they are busy!).