mevs904

No problem at all! I’m happy to answer any other questions that you may have.😀

We’d always enjoyed traditional dining so we reserved a table for the first night. We liked our table and our servers so we reserved it for the entire cruise. There was a lovely grandmother and granddaughter next to us and we enjoyed each other’s company so much that they also reserved their table for the remainder of their segment of the cruise. After that there was no need to stand in line. The head waiter told us to go right past the line each night and right to our table. It was smooth and relaxing to walk past the line with no waiting. I should note that we made our reservations for 8:00 and despite the fact that the dining room was quite busy at that time, I’m not sure how well that would work at an earlier hour. We would definitely use this strategy again.

We sailed from Rome and disembarked in Barcelona. Istanbul was the main attraction for us and we were very happy to explore it with Ephesus Shuttle, have the price of the Princess excursions and only 10 people. They were very conscientious about getting us back in plenty of time both in Istanbul and Kusadasi.

We were on the Enchanted Mediterranean cruise from June 24 (Rome) to July 8 (Barcelona). It was an excellent cruise with beautiful weather and a wonderful itinerary. This was our first post-Covid cruise and the experience was completely positive. There were no indications of illness on board, very little coughing, and fewer than 1% of the passengers wore masks. Both embarkation and disembarkation were flawless. We did not have our medallions mailed to us and it took us less than 2 minutes to get them at check-in. They worked quite well for us, but we are not inclined to order food or drinks with them. We prefer to do it ourselves. We did order drinks once or twice, but decided it was quicker to do it ourselves. (Besides, it was better for us to get up and burn a few of the calories that we were consuming. We can’t say enough for the wonderful crew on this ship. They were a delight to interact with. Here are a few random thoughts about the cruise. —Wonderful ports, Istanbul was the highlight for us and we had an outstanding excursion through Ephesus Shuttle who also gave us our Kusadasi excursion. Excellent guides, maximum of 10 passengers in a modern comfortable van. We highly recommend them —Brilliant destination talks by Johanna Grove who unfortunately had to leave mid-cruise due to family illness, but are pre-recorded her talks for each port before she left. I can see that this is getting very long, so I’ll just stop and will be happy to answer any questions. Bottom line: best cruise ever and we would love to do it again!

This sounds disappointing. On our Coral cruise several years ago Libby Riddles brought two or three of her puppies onboard at about 5:00pm. There was a nice, but not overwhelming crowd there and no lines. Libby also spoke to passengers and answered questions. Ah well, all good things must end. I would have liked my Grandboys to have had that experience.

Ah! Got it. Thanks!

I wasn’t worried about disembarking in Barcelona. I knew that would happen. I was just curious about your post where you said, “Barcelona will be a port stop, not a turnaround or disembarkation.”

LibertyBella, off topic, but will you be on the June 24 sailing? We are so looking forward to that cruise.

Thanks, Eaglesbrech! I wasn’t familiar with the term “naff” so I looked it up and now I learned something new. I agree with your assessment of the color combination.

Thank you for your suggestions. We would probably tend toward a Viking ship and of course there’s Disney which we have sailed with numerous times. It will be interesting to see how much we miss a promenade deck on our upcoming Enchanted cruise. That will help us decide our future course of action.

Yes, thank you Buckeye10640. We have sailed on both the Royal and Regal and have used the areas that you mentioned. We certainly appreciated the opportunity that those areas gave us to be near the sea.

Well, a promenade deck is a major priority for us as we enjoy being at sea, always get a balcony, and prefer to spend our time sitting or walking along the promenade deck rather than being in the indoor mall inside. That being said, our next cruise is on the Enchanted because of the rich Mediterranean itinerary. Perhaps someday we may sail on the Sun or Star, but in the meantime we will be looking to book cruises on ships (including other cruise lines) that do have promenade decks so we can enjoy being closer to the ocean.

The representative that we worked with said that they were significantly overbooked. Apparently the algorithm that they usually use didn’t work and they had more bookings than they expected.

We’ve sailed on the Royal and enjoyed the buffet, but nothing will make up for the loss of the promenade deck, especially in Alaska. We were fortunate to have cruised Alaska on the Coral (newer is not always better). We looking to take our grandsons on an Alaska cruise and will hold out for a Grand class ship with a promenade deck.

Yes, fpsphil, perhaps we’ll meet. Hoping for good weather. As it turned out, the weather for our original cruise was marginal at best—58 degrees and rain on our scheduled Istanbul day. Being on deck should be a lot more pleasant in June.

We happily accepted a Move Over Offer for our April 22 Mediterranean cruise. The rep that we spoke to on the phone couldn’t have been nicer or more efficient. We are now booked on the June 24 cruise with the same itinerary. She even found us a mini suite on the new cruise that is a little bigger than the one we had and she rebooked our EZ Air flights and told us that Princess would absorb the extra cost for the new flights since air fare has gone up lately. This all transpired two days before we were to fly to Rome for our original cruise. Fortunately, we are retired and flexible. It doesn’t get much better than that.

ldtr has posted some good advice here. The best benefit is getting a FCD is receiving the money back as OBC on the cruise where you use it. One small note, one of our FCDs expired recently due to our not cruising for a couple of years and we received our deposits back by way of a check, not a return to our credit cards. That makes sense since credit card account numbers sometimes get changed when there is some kind of security breach at a large business. (It happened to us twice. We were not negatively impacted, but did receive new cards very quickly.)

Well, we’ve been very lucky on our previous 6 cruises. We enjoyed the other couples at our table and we all looked forward to seeing each other at dinner and sharing our experiences. There was one exception with a couple where the man bragged about removing their gratuities and put ketchup on his well done prime rib..ugh on both counts. We’re going with a table for two on our Mediterranean cruise next month. As far as Fettuccine Alfredo is concerned, we’re happy to see it regularly back on the menu. We believe the posters who say that the strip steak is sub-par and most likely will not try it.

I agree with Kay S. We go to Maine frequently so we are not impressed with the lobsters on Princess.

We love sail away in San Juan but it might not be on your itinerary.

Yes, a converter was what I meant. Thank you. I assumed that Princess ships all had 110 outlets but wanted to make sure. Trying to prevent a preventable mishap. I appreciate your response.

I’ve used the Princess hairdryers in the past and they weren’t too bad. I just read a post on another thread that said that they weren’t good and that you should bring your own dryer. I really don’t want to do that. Would it require an adaptor. Adaptors don’t work well on hairdryers and sometimes blow them out. This is important to me. because I need a decent hairdryer to style my naturally curly/frizzy hair. We will be sailing on the Enchanted so I hope they haven’t put weak hairdryers on the newer ships.

Another Coral fan here. We sailed on her to Alaska and the Panama Canal and were booked on her for a March 2020 South America/Antarctica cruise and then the Covid shutdown happened. After that we like the other ships that have a wrap around promenade deck. We’ve also sailed on the Royal and Regal but have no desire to return to them. We don’t mind the size. It’s the lack of a promenade deck that turns us off. We will be sailing on the Enchanted in June because of the wonderful Mediterranean itinerary, but are currently looking at other cruise lines for future cruises whose ships have full promenade decks.

We have taken a Princess Alaska cruise, but have never sailed with HAL. As others have said, the presentations by naturalists that Princess provides are excellent. Those presentations were one of the highlights of our cruise. We also agree that an itinerary including Glacier Bay is a must. In the next few years we would like to take or family (son, DIL, 2 grandsons) on an Alaska cruise. We will definitely choose Princess, but it will be important for us to sail on the older ships that have a full promenade deck. For us this is a must in Alaska. We were fortunate to have sailed on the Coral in Alaska and despite the fact that we had a balcony cabin we consistently frequented and loved the many observation areas on that ship. Sadly, the Coral has been moved to another area.