First time on Discovery Princess, first time on Princess, but have taken almost 30 cruises on other cruise lines. Had always wanted to sail on Princess. Overall, I had a good time (despite getting Covid-19) and the ship was nice, but there were a few things that I found disappointing and would not make Princess my first choice in the future. I am not a fan of the Medallion App due to the time it took pre-cruise to get everything set up/entered. It was cumbersome to try to find things on the App pre cruise and would prefer to use the lap top website to just enter the info required for check in. Also you could not book excursions pre boarding on the App – did not make sense to me. It did work well for making dining reservations for our party pre-boarding. It did work fine for us on the ship (even ordered food to the Vista lounge while watching some NFL football), with a small hiccup 2x when we came back on the ship from port. We just had to log out and log back in – not a big deal. Using the locate your shipmate was handy on one occasion. My big problem is that I did not like the App to look at the schedule of events (prefer the paper Princess Patter that my cabin steward gave us). It was just not user friendly and difficulty/time consuming to scroll through on the App. Also I could never find the opening/closing times of the restaurants, shops, bars, etc on the App. Maybe I just missed it?

We were booked on the September 18th Alaska cruise from Seattle to Vancouver. For some reason this was unfortunately not a RT out of Seattle due to the end of the season I guess. I would have preferred RT since we had to deal with the ArrivCan app and a one way flight from Vancouver to San Diego which was more expensive and more complex as there were not a lot of choices/direct flights.

Anyway, the Discovery Princess is a nice looking ship. As it is fairly brand new, everything seemed in good shape. Being new to Princess I failed to do my due diligence and just booked a standard balcony cabin. Once I realized that it did not have a small sitting area (small couch) but just one chair and a desk, I would have upgraded to the deluxe balcony or even the mini suite (our friends had one and it was a nice size, though the jacuzzi tub seemed like a waste of space). I tried to do so through our TA but was quoted a ridiculous price to do so and I never received (despite being eligible) the request to bid on a better cabin. So not sure what happened there. The cabin was FINE just a bit tighter than I’m used to. The bed was comfortable, and I liked the pillow menu! The cabin steward was great and kept the cabin in prefect order. The balcony is small. 2 chairs and a small table. We were R704 – more after on the port side, Rivera deck. The cabin was quiet and conveniently located to the stairs/elevator and the laundry room where we actually did some self-laundry. Nice that it was free (soap and dryer sheets too!). I liked the large closet, though could have used a few more shelves. Plenty of hangers for a 7 night cruise. The bathroom is SMALL. Hopefully you are not a large person or I have no idea how you would turn around in there. The shower was fine, but really on a new ship I was surprised it was a shower curtain and not shower doors as I am used to on other ships. The flat screen TV was good, though it was not the fast reaction when you tried to move through the channel choices. I liked that there was room in the closet to store our luggage instead of putting it under the bed like on other ships. Read more