My wife and I sailed on the September 18 Discovery Princess voyage, starting in Seattle and ending in Vancouver. This was our 18th cruise, 7th to Alaska, and 3rd on Princess. I personally favor the large NCL ships such as the Bliss and Encore with their rich choices of entertainment and wonderful accommodations in their Haven. Due to pandemic related travel credits we had on Princess from a cancelled Asia cruise, we decided to book an Alaskan voyage from our Seattle hometown on the brand new Discovery Princess.

The mixed reviews I read in advance tempered our expectations for the voyage. I was pleasantly surprised that Princess provided a wonderful vacation that I would have no hesitation to repeat.

The worst part of the cruise was the frustrations with the Princess medallion application and attempted registration. My wife was unable to register her phone with our reservation despite half a dozen calls to Princess and repeated assurances they would take care of it. I was able to get green lane status and have both of our medallions delivered despite my wife’s malfunctioning app. Ultimately, we just showed up to the port with passports, medallions, two negative covid tests and the Arrive CAN QR code. Living in Seattle, we used Uber to get to the port and arrived at 1:15 for our 3:00 departure time and found little waiting or hassle to check in and board. Our relatively late arrival still allowed us to be on board within 20 minutes of starting the check in procedure. Unfortunately, my wife’s IT struggles continued – her medallion was rejected for boarding the Discovery Princess. Security just waved her through and told us to get it fixed on board which led to four different visits to the front desk. Despite assurances it was fixed, she was unable to open the cabin door initially. Later, she her medallion would be constantly rejected when leaving and returning to the ship. Clearly Princess has a work to do on their IT which brings up another issue commonly reported – internet service. Princess’ internet certainly is inferior to our experiences on NCL or RCL, but our service was better than what we expected based on previous reviews. We both had unlimited 1 device service. Except during the sailing up Endicott arm to Dawes glacier we were able to get service. It was slow 50-300 kbps (i.e. “dial up” speed) with significantly delayed latency times >1 sec. You can’t teleconference and streaming video is a pain particularly during busy times. But you can access most heavy text sites like newspapers and answer emails. Hopefully, Princess will invest in Starlink access in the future. Read more