Diamond Princess Review

4.0 / 5.0
922 reviews

Fantastic - Highly Recommend!

Review for Hawaii Cruise on Diamond Princess
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CaliMar
First Time Cruiser • Age 110s

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Sail Date: Mar 2008
Cabin: Balcony

For many years we have wanted to do a cruise to Hawaii. DH has previously flown to Honolulu, cruised the islands and then to Ensenada with a bus trip back to LAX and didn't wax all that poetic about the experience. This left me none too enthusiastic about it being my "ideal Hawaiian cruise vacation". Several months ago a neighbor mentioned round-trip cruises from LA to Hawaii so I thought I'd check into it. Our phenomenal TA (thru whom we've booked all our cruises) provided several options and we decided Princess was the best fit for us.

We live approximately 1 hour north of the Los Angeles/San Pedro harbor so we didn't have any significant travel to the embarkation port... and no hotel-stay was necessary. Our TA had completed all of our registration paperwork ahead of time and when we received our pre-travel paperwork in the mail from Princess, we were pleased to find everything was accurate. We logged on and selected our shore excursions prior to the cut-off date but were disappointed some were already sold out (that'll teach us to do this far ahead of time from now on!!). A few days after the cut-off date I called Princess directly and they were fantastic about allowing us to add one more excursion that was still available.

Although the paperwork said to arrive after 1pm for quicker check-in, the traffic that morning was rather light and we made it to the pier by noon. Parking was effortless, though at $12/day it's ridiculously expensive for a 15 day cruise... admitted other options such as taxi or shuttle were priced just about the same so we felt it was 6-of-1... ½-dozen-of-another. We considered having a friend drop us off and pick us up but departing on a Monday in the middle of a workday and returning on a Tuesday morning, well, that knocked out that option as well. So okay, we sucked it up and decided to just pay for parking. Getting thru the check in lines was an absolute breeze with all the Princess employees being courteous, efficient and professional. There were two separate lines for taking the embarkation photo and because we were told the backgrounds were the same in each photo-station, we selected the shorter line. Later while we were onboard we were disappointed to see the backgrounds were definitely not the same. At any rate, the embarkation process was a breeze (especially when compared to our most recent experience with Carnival at the Long Beach pier) and by 12:30 we were in our stateroom depositing our carry-on items.

Cabin Review

Balcony

Cabin BA
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