We booked our cruise on the Sapphire Princess to give us a chance to get to know our future son-in-law as well as to celebrate Thanksgiving. As so many others do, we left a day early to avoid last minute snafus. Fortunately, nothing happened! Our flight on Southwest Airlines was smooth all the way, and they did their usual great job with pre-boarding, etc. I'm disabled and use a scooter to get around, so I'll also base my comments on how well Princess does with disabled passengers..

Embarkation at the San Pedro harbor was the best ever. I would suggest, though, that if you have a GPS unit, program it with all your addresses before you leave - it just makes things go easier, especially if you're not familiar with the area.

There was only one negative about Embarkation/Debarkation and I'll mention it now. We all know about the fuel surcharges and the "will they/won't they" that's been going on. We were told that Princess would refund the fuel surcharge provided the price of oil didn't go over a certain point over the prior thirty days. In our case, it did -five cents a barrel over on one day (election day). Princess was under no obligation to refund any of our money but it would have been priceless in terms of PR if they had. There were no lines when we arrived at 2:00 p.m., and we literally breezed through check-in. We'd heard that Princess had new rules for debarkation in place, but you could have fooled us. We were up with the chickens only to sit with other sleepy people in a lounge waiting to get in line... remember the drill? Read more