This was our 6th Princess cruise, 11th overall. The cruise was mostly great, but I'll start with the bad. Maybe the worst embarkation we have had. The staging area was basically a wide sidewalk, with all of the luggage carts leaving just enough space for a line and a small space for people walking to the end of that line. This was our first cruise as Platinum passengers so we had preferred boarding. When we got to the door of the building we got into the preferred line and I think many non-preferred did too (nobody was really checking). The preferred line had one security Xray machine and the non-preferred had 3, and the non-preferred line was moving much faster than ours. Then we hit dead stop for about 10 minutes as they announced it was too full upstairs to let any more passengers in. They also announced that Regal Princess was using their usual pier and this was a smaller secondary pier. There was only one gangway that could be used to board the ship and that was also contributing to the delay. Anyway, it took about an hour and 15 minutes to board.

The only other negative was lack of stairs with the center bank of elevators. This caused these elevators to be extremely slow and always full. After using them once or twice, we always walked forward or aft to use either the stairs or elevators there.

Other than that, everything was quite good. The ship is beautiful, our cabin was very nice and cabin service was excellent. The balcony was smaller than usual, as others have said, but it was fine for the 2 of us. We did anytime dining and the food in the MDRs was excellent. I am gluten free and require a special diet and they took excellent care of me. We ate at Sabatini's one night because it was a freebie from our travel agent and it was fine, but I wouldn't pay $25 to eat there again. My steak and my wife's shrimp were excellent, but our pasta dishes were so-so and the desserts were good but not exceptional. The entertainment was good with 2 or of the shows being excellent. There were a number of fun activities onboard and the cruise directors staff were all very good at keeping us entertained. Disembarkation was well organized and pretty quick as we were at Princess's main pier for that.