My wife, son (13) and I were on the Caribbean Princess for the scheduled southern Caribbean cruise leaving San Juan on March 11th. With well over 20 cruises behind us, this was only our second with Princess after a not-so-satisfactory first experience over 10 years ago. We opted for this cruise after deciding that maybe we owed PCL another chance, but mostly because its itinerary, which included Grenada and Bonaire, two of the few ports in the Caribbean we had never visited before. The itinerary had special additional appeal because we have a daughter attending medical school in Bonaire and we had scheduled a rendezvous with her and a tour of her school and her favourite island haunts.

Now in spite of the fact that it's a few years older than many of the mainstream ships, the Caribbean Princess is a beautiful craft. Tones are subdued; the decor is modern and attractive without some of the garish qualities that we see on the RCL or Carnival Ships. We had a balcony cabin, amidships on Baja deck and it was more than comfortable even for the three of us. Our cabin service was excellent and Raul looked after us very well even though the circumstances of the cruise (as described below) meant that we were to spend much more time on board the ship than would ever be the norm on a 7 day cruise.

Ours was an ill-fated voyage. The ship left San Juan on time Sunday evening, but somewhere along the way, developed what turned out to be a serious problem with its port propulsion engine. We limped our way to Saint Maarten arriving after two the following afternoon. We waited close to the ship for all of Monday and Tuesday while engineers flown to Saint Maarten assessed the damage to the engines. Frustrations were building as we resolved ourselves to the fact that the next port (St Lucia) would likely have to be skipped and we started to fret about our visits to the our only two virgin ports, Grenada and Bonaire, and our much anticipated reunion with our daughter. Read more