Beautiful ship and attentive crew. Comfortable stateroom. Good food, entertainment, amenities, etc. for just about any interest and taste. Theater shows were high-quality plus the go-kart track was a blast. Go figure - Getting back into pingpong was an unexpected bonus.

All of the good stuff had a terrible downside. Poor communication of key information such as boarding/disembarkation was only surpassed by the pain of actually enduring the process used. Instead of a staggered boarding process, there was only an extremely long line that snaked through a very large building, plus around it outside. This took about 3 hours to complete. At one point, the line snaked around a big room only to end up seating people near the door that they entered. An entire port visit was cancelled completely. At San Francisco, every passenger was required to exit with none allowed to return until everyone was off. We felt lucky to take only 2 hours on this, although others took much longer. Since we had no knowledge of what was involved until the night before, we thus missed an onshore appointment. Whereas I suspect that the port authorities have certain requirements, it almost appeared that the cruise line had not actually gone through these activities before. Of course, because the line in fact regularly enters ports of multiple nations, there is no excuse apparent for the long lines, waits and significant (un-communicated) reduction in shore time.

We did not take any cruise-line arranged shore excursions, so I cannot comment on them.