I find it very important to give Princess Cruises an honest opinion of our recent cruise and how disappointing it was. For this reason I sent them a letter that is summarized by my review. After the 2-year hiatus, we were glad to not only to travel again, but to support our favorite cruise brand, and once again sail on the Ruby. We knew the risks, (well not all of them) however, their Cruise with Confidence gave us some sense of security that it would all work out in the end. The challenges of cruising remain great; however, we were willing to take some risks to finally get on board. We understood that the CDC was backing off from cruise lines and thought that their protocols would be somewhat diminished. (How wrong we were). As the Quality Assurance and Health and Safety officer for a plastics company, I have been very involved with our covid response and spent many months managing policy’s, training, and communications to protect our workers and customers. I was very surprised to see a lack of protective policies during this cruise along with the fundamental communication techniques that are required to ensure people’s safety.

Here's our experience.

Embarkation: We showed up at the port right on time for our A group early boarding. Princess was not ready. We stood in low 60-degree weather for about a half hour or more with no information as to what the delay was. Attendants merely said, “it will be soon”. After the shivering wait, we finally got through inspection and landed on a very confused representative that went through our paperwork but didn’t know how to deal with my wife’s Dutch passport. It’s different than a Canadian or US one and the requirements for an ESTA and Permanent Resident card seemed new to her so she was unfamiliar with what to do. Her check of our covid results was nothing more than a glance and it appeared that details were not checked carefully. (Not that it mattered to us.) After she got some assistance, she was able to get her computer to do what it needed to for releasing us into the next line for our medallions. This line was more of a bunch of people than a line and people were asking where we go. Several hands just pointed us into a general direction. With medallions in hand we were then sent to sit…well…”stand” as there were no seats available in what was a Platinum area. There was no lounge. In recent years, we found Princess embarkation to be an organized and relatively fast process, but this was nothing of the kind. At least we’re now warming up and had decided not to let this poorly run process ruin our cruise. We were told that masks were mandatory until we boarded the ship, and from there on they were “optional but recommended” when social distancing could not be performed. Read more