Dear Princess Cruises,  

Please STOP sending me those daily brochures & postcards about your next big cruise discounts, or email requests for me to write a review.

Oh, believe me – I wrote my review already. In fact, it was a bit “angry” in tone, because I was.

Now that it’s been over a year, I am calmer. I decided to write a letter (this one) to your Headquarters, with suggestions about things that need to be improved on.  If no one tells you these things, then you won’t know what’s going on, and that would be bad for business.

Train your booking agents to know the difference between “Ocean View”, “Obstructed View”, and “Partially Obstructed View”. We paid $600 extra to have an Ocean View and our view was more obstructed than a cruise-mates Obstructed View. This did not start our voyage very happily.

Change your embarkation & security procedures. Hire more people, or something. Standing for three hours (on cement) in a port terminal, waiting for thousands of people to be questioned, scanned and x-rayed was ridiculous! Then, we slowly crept, mostly standing, up the 6 huge flights of scaffolding to the embarkation deck. The delay? Another security check at the ramp. In case we became nefarious between the port terminal and the ship. Or connected with an Arms Dealer we knew in town. Lord knows we had the time, but come on!

Don’t put a couple in a family cabin. We had no kids to sleep in the bunk-bed contraptions, and even when closed, they stuck out of the wall, giving us zero room around our bed.  We had to crawl from the foot of the bed to get in. I had more contact with those safety hazards than I did with my hubby. All the “family” cabins must be clumped together because we heard kids day and night. This also did not make us happy.

Please do not get in our faces about purchasing anything.  After finally getting on-board ship, we headed over to the “grill” to get food, and something to drink. Along with everyone else in line who missed lunch.  As soon as we found a place to sit, we were approached by a crew member wanting to sell us the ships “drink discount packages”. We opted not to purchase it. Eleven times, to eleven different crew members.  Extremely tacky, folks.

Coffee and Tea are supposed to be included.  However, in the Coffee Lounge, you have to pay for your coffee.

Offer a good quality WiFi if you’re going to have any.  $.79 per minute is way over priced for a crappy connection. You should think about providing access at no charge for your guests – like nice hotels do.

Upgrade your speaker system. The Captain gave a ‘good morning’ speech that told about the port city and the day’s weather every morning, so we were told.  The hallway and cabin speakers garbled sound so badly that he could have been telling us to abandon ship or something serious. It wasn’t until the end of our cruise that I learned he spoke English.

Do something about all the charges!  Make the cruise tickets more expensive and don’t “nickel and dime” us every time we turn around. Our final ‘charges’ were nearly $1,000, and we did not drink a bunch of expensive wine or cocktails. Somehow we accrued $150 of ‘charges’ per day.

I did not feel like a princess, nor was I treated like one.

I hope my review opens your eyes, for the sake of future passengers. However, I will not be one of them.

Sincerely,
Jodi Lea