We chose this cruise because of the itinerary - in my opinion it is the best British Isles itinerary available. Before the cruise we spent 3 nights in London, which was wonderful. We embarked at Southampton; the embarkation process was very smooth. Someone from Princess grabbed our bags from our transport and took them directly to the ship - we never had to handle them. Inside the terminal everything was very organized and moved along pretty quickly.

The ports we visited were St. Peter Port in Guernsey, Cobh (Cork) and Dublin in Ireland, Belfast in Northern Ireland, Liverpool in England, Greenock (Glasgow), Invergordon, and South Queensferry (Edinburgh) in Scotland, and LeHavre in France, with a return to Southampton.

We did Princess excursions at every port except Guernsey (we stayed on the ship to relax after 3 hectic days in London). All of the excursions were excellent; I would highly recommend taking Princess excursions for two reasons: (1) they are well organized, and the excursion providers have been checked out by Princess and are reliable, (2) if you get stuck in traffic or otherwise delayed on a Princess excursion, the ship will wait for you; if you are out on your own they can leave you behind. This did in fact happen at one of the ports, and an announcement was made that we were waiting for a bus load of passengers to come on board before taking off. I don't have a bad thing to say about any of the excursions -- we saw Blarney Castle, Malahide Castle, Giant's Causeway (really awesome), Chester Cathedral, Glasgow Cathedral, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Cawdor Castle, Urquhart Castle, Edinburgh Castle, Omaha Beach and the American Cemetery in Normandy, and Stonehenge. The guides were all very knowledgeable, and the excursions were all well organized. Read more