We chose this particular voyage to sail out of San Diego (first time) and escape the winter cold to Hawaii.

Having been on 16 prior Princess ships, we had learned to expect the normal of "Princess perfect" for this voyage, also. Alas, this wasn't to be the case.

Embarkation: Both the Diamond Princess and Disney Wonder were simultaneously in port. We discovered that the Port of San Diego is barely set up for one ship, much less two. A combined number of +- 6000 passengers converged on the area, forming a mass of humanity that stretched out onto Harbor Blvd. There were no signage/directions/employees from either company to bring order to this chaos. There was one four-foot-wide gate that everyone had to squeeze through one at a time. For Princess passengers, you than drug your luggage across a parking lot (under construction) dodging incoming Princess buses and uber vehicles. You dumped your luggage alongside the ship (we found out later that the shoreside porters quit and walked off the job shortly thereafter, so Princess had to bring out employees for this.) You then reversed your steps, dodging the traffic again to get in another long, winding line that snaked around the outside of the terminal. This event took over one hour to enter the terminal, and we began to notice some of the elderly passengers starting to suffer from the effects of this. Princess appeared to be woefully understaffed for the mass of foot traffic inside. Our vaunted Elite priority boarding practice was nowhere to be seen, you just stayed in line with everyone else. After 3.5 hours of waiting, we stepped onto the ship at 3pm. Our luggage had not arrived at our stateroom by 8:30 pm, so that necessitated a search on our part to go find it. Read more