I was a huge fan of Celebrity and only cruised with Princess because they placed a ship in our home port of San Francisco. After the restart from CoVid, I completely changed my opinions of what I loved about cruising. We had a Celebrity cruise booked and paid in full for a few years before it finally came to fruition last year. Since we were already down in Los Angeles, we decided to book a side by side with our celebrity cruise followed by hopping terminals to cruise on Princess next. The differences were stark! We didn’t have a bad time on Celebrity, it just wasn’t Princess, which we’ve grown to love. We both said, “now we’re home” when having our first drink up at Bellinis.
I did recently post a wish list for Princess on this forum and do have a complaint now and again, but our experiences since July 2021 have won us over and we now consider Princess cruises over all other lines. Increased costs may leave our travel budget short so, we may not be able to cruise as often but everything else in our daily cost of living has gone up as well. I am a bit of a Princess cheerleader .. maybe more than a bit. But, I’m also not an apologist. There will never be another Jan Schwartz so JP had a very large pair of shoes to fill. I don’t think he’s done everything perfectly but also don’t blame him for much of the cost cutting, the changing cruise environment, the roll out of the Sun or many other issues that pop up from time to time. I think inflation has hit every cruise line and the CoVid shut down and the difficult recovery has really hit the cruise lines hard.
Princess is still filling their ships to max capacity and think they have a solid product for all ages.