harryfat1

The flight itself was fine. No complaints. Although as I get older, my back/butt are less happy to be in the seats for these long flights. After 3 hours, you start to lose feeling in your butt as you wonder when they designed these airplane seats, they must have conformed with SOMEONE’s body as to make it ergonomic but you know for sure they didn’t design it with your back/butt in mind. Anyway, I was trying to get the free texting thing to work in the air but was never able to connect on WhatsApp. I downloaded few episodes of the Sci-Fi series “Expanse” to watch to kill time as well as listened to few songs I typically listen to while flying. As it was a 4.5 hour flight (same distance as flying from California to Georgia) , they served drinks twice which meant there was a long line for the restrooms after each serving – you know, that intake/outtake equilibrium thing so that the more comes in, the more it needs to go out. They now serve Vegan snacks As I get motion sick easily, I always opt for ginger ale on flights to calm my stomach The scenery did become interesting the last 30 minutes of the flight as we flew over numerous snow capped mountains as we approached Anchorage but would be better if there were less clouds to cover the mountains

Typically I don’t like to fly the morning before the flight. My original plan was to fly on Alaska for the 8 PM flight landing in Alaska after midnight. Go to airport hotel and sleep and off to the ship next day. Yeah, we will be tired but by flying late but this option saves me a vacation day. For those of us who are still working, you can appreciate trying to save an extra precious vacation day. Besides, not as if there’s much to do in Anchorage airport area after arriving at 5 PM. I guess if one has extra couple days, then exploring outskirts of Anchorage is an option but not in our case. However, Alaska Airline canceled our 8 PM flight and dumped the 6 of us in the 12 noon flight without notifying me directly. Only saw the warning on Princess web site one day and noticed the whole family was scattered all over the newly assigned plane seats so I had to scramble to re-seat all of us together. Somehow Princess/Alaska Air did not link the 3 cabins together. So here is another somewhat personal question/survey to throw out there: Do y’all wear extra loose jeans clothes on long flights? As I get older (and rounder), I’m finding the looser jeans on flights to be a preferred option. So I put on the baggiest pair of jeans I have so I can sit through the 4.5 hour flight. Next time I fly, I might switch to jogger pants as I won’t have to deal with taking off the belt as the TSA inspection and the joggers are more comfortable than jeans for the longer flight. I can't be the only person doing this, right? Leave a comment below… Anyway, few pics of SFO as we chilled out waiting to board

Day 0 – Flying to Anchorage Typically it’s hard to wake up my boys early in the morning but one first day of vacation, everyone woke up early and were rearing to go. Made our way to SFO and met up with the in-laws there and checked our luggage with Alaska Air and went through the always terrible TSA experience. I think the TSA workers get their pay deducted if they smile or show any signs of friendly human behavior. After the always unpleasant TSA experience, SFO is a rather decent airport to hang out for a bit as we ate our home packed lunch before getting on the plane. So for those wondering, why is this dude calling himself Cheapo Dad? Here’s one reason: Bring your own lunch to the airport instead of buying the overpriced airport fast food. SFO has water dispensers so you can fill up with water post TSA security check so save on the $2.50 bottled water that Costco sells for 10 cents a bottle. Speaking of Costco – these were all Costco bought food items for a lunch that’s fraction of cost of airport meal. Everyone gets a brown bag special. Philly Cheese and some crackers and boba for dessert. 3 course meal plus healthy tab water.🤪 Water bottle refill. My sons brought their own water bottle to refill post TSA checkpoint SFO had nice chairs you can sit and chill to eat lunch

Day Minus 1 – Finally we get to the actual cruise part. As discussed previously, we were required to be Covid tested prior to sailing as that was the requirement to enter Canada during our sailing. Scheduled the online proctored tests for the 4 of us and got the results within an hour to print hard copies for everyone (Yeah, sue me if I prefer hard copy printouts). For those of us still working, I always said there’s no happier moment than when we walk out of the office right before vacation with car key in your hand knowing you don’t have to come back for one plus week. For the current Covid days when some people are working remotely, it’s when you closed your laptop with out of office email message in MS Outlook saying you are out for next X number of days. If I can only bottle this happiness feeling and add it to water and sell it for $1, I would be filthy rich. Who wouldn’t want that pre vacation happiness feeling in your drink for a buck? It’s all “organic”. Nothing artificial. No liver damage like alcohol at a fraction of the cost. Anyway, we uploaded all the documents that the Medallion app wanted. Technically we are “green” lane in the Princess app but as we will find out later, it made no difference on the color of lane for Whittier departure. Also completed the “Arrive Can” app for our eventual arrival into Vancouver but no one checked or asked about it at check in while at Whittier. No matter how early you plan your cruise, there’s always the last-minute stuff to pack on the night before. You get into the “panic mode” of “just in case” as the anal side of you thinking you have space in the suitcase so mind as well throw it in at 11 PM debating to bring something or not.

Well, I didn’t want to go down the negative path on what part of the Medallion app is not working this early in the trip report so that’s why I said if everything works as intended, you will get what you ordered with the price listed. I’m sure if I start a new thread on “Tell me a story on when the Medallion didn’t work as intended on your cruise”, I can get 50 posts in couple of days from people with their stories on what went wrong. There’s a reason why the app got a 1.5 star rating. Yeah, some of our orders on the app never made it to us even though on the app it said “delivered” to where we were but we never got anything. Maybe someone else got our drinks. Not sure. As we were on the Princess package, we didn’t have to pay for the missing drinks so we just ordered a new round but if we had to pay a la carte, then I would be at guest services trying to dispute the charges as we never got the drinks we ordered. All 6 of us wore the medallion on the lanyards but for our sailing, that didn’t seem to make much of a difference as the app more or less knows where we were per the location menu as it knew we were at the buffet. Although given how buggy the system is, I have no doubts others ran into the same situation as you on placement of the medallion would be key.

Good point. Thanks for that clarification. Being cheap, I have never eaten at any specialty dining as I just stick with whatever is part of the complementary offerings so my cheap brain never thinks about specialty dining. So, for the basic items like burgers and hot dogs, you can order it sent to you wherever you are on the ship. We never ordered any food from the app as we were always full from the 3 regular meals but we did ordered drinks on numerous occasions. I think the food ordering on the app can be especially useful feature on glacier days as people sit inside the covered indoor area of Hollywood Conservatory can order food and drink all day and not leave their spot. Don't think these people are getting up anytime soon.

Thanks for the note and following along. Good to be cruising again after a 4+ year hiatus. Princess offered better itinerary option for glacier viewing than RCI so we jumped ship (figuratively) but as I will report later on, there are some things RCI offers that we sorely missed.

Thanks for the suggestion to cruise to Hawaii but too many sea days (5) to get there and back. My brother in law did the Princess cruise to Hawaii for 15 days few years back but not for us. First of all, I get sea sick easily. 5 days of open ocean in December is not a good thing for me. I'm not a true CC that can be in the ocean for days on. After 2 days, I'm ready to get off. Second, can't get away from work for that long. One plus week of vacation with lots of stuff to do. Well, it’s interesting in what you said about men and their choose to pay attention to. My wife is a firm believer that when few women meet up for the first time, after several hours, the women will share with each on their family situations and what issues they face within their families. Whereas when you have a group of guys meet up for the first time, they will generally talk sports and DIY home projects and avoid personal topics. After several hours of conversation, all the men know about each other are each other’s favorite sports teams and why such and such team shouldn’t have made the trade last month as well as how to fix a leaky toilet (see how I always bring back bathroom humor? why take the high road when the low road has no tolls?) Oh, yeah, I hope nobody who is reading this thread is in a hurry to learn about Alaska info ahead of your cruise next week as we blabber on about non cruise stuff. Bet you didn’t expect to read about discussion on difference between genders on an Alaska cruise report…

OK. Back to more trip reporting stuff: Without getting too deep into what’s wrong with the Medallion app, let’s just go over how it was supposed to work if everything works as intended. The idea is you have the medallion "device” with you and then you whip out the phone and order all the food/drinks on the menu and the workers will know where you are with the medallion tracker and bring you the food/drink. The ultimate in laziness and relaxation of cruising if everything works as it's supposed to. Here are some screen shots of the food/drinks you can order from the phone. These only pop up on day 1 of the cruise and disabled after the cruise as I was trying to play with the app pre cruise and saw nothing so if you have an upcoming cruise, you will just need to wait until day 1 to see but at least this give you a glimpse on what the app will look like once onboard. These are just some of the selection options. Not the 100% comprehensive list of what you can order from the app. Didn't want to take that many screen shots - yeah, yeah, like I said, not a professional cruise reviewer. You get what you paid for in reading this... Main menu to show what categories you can order your food/drinks: If you press "Beverage" section, you will see a sub menu of various beverages available: Under that there are more sub menus the drinks are shown in their sub group: These are the popular frozen drinks section. Although for Alaska, it's hard to drink cold drink when it's cold outside looking at the glaciers More drinks: And more: For the beer fans: For the coffee fans: OK, here is something every RCI cruiser is envious of - FREE room service delivery of food instead of the $7.95 that RCI charges. I believe the only charge Princess has is $3 for pizza. Nevertheless, far better than what RCI has to offer And you can order desserts delivered to your cabin or anywhere on the ship

Thanks for the kind words. Hopefully there will be something helpful in this trip report for your upcoming cruise next year. Different ship but maybe some similar ports/glaciers. Feel free to ask anything as I’m just as a newbie Princess cruiser as you (discounting the cruise from 20 years ago). Yeah, many of us men do the smell test to see if something can be worn twice so it’s not surprising he comes back with more than one pair of clean underwear. Hey, one can barely smell anything 10 feet away so this can last another day or two…🤪

Thanks for reading another installment in the series. Glad to have you back. Although my joke writing team is still a staff of one so there won’t be much improvement on that front. We typically only cruise once a year as between work and kids school time, it’s hard to get away often as compared to some folks here on CC that cruises more often than I mow my lawn…🤪 We went to Disneyworld in 2018 and Japan (and of course Tokyo Disneyland & Disney Sea) in 2019. Then Covid prevented more cruises until now. As we all miss cruising, we are booked for Christmas week cruise in 2023 as that’s the only time it works for the family schedule. We always loved the festive holiday decors on ships so it’s really nice to go away to see Caribbean Santa. The drawback is Christmas week is crazy expensive between higher cruise fares on top of outrageous airfares, Cheapo Dad needs to go to therapy after every holiday cruise from post traumatic shock after seeing the credit card bills…

Wow, I’m honored and perplexed the same time. Honored in that you are reading my “blah, blah, blah” trip report while on a cruise. Much appreciated. Perplexed in WHY are you reading my “blah, blah, blah” trip report while on a cruise? Shouldn’t you be out and about on the ship enjoying the Alaska scenery and food instead of reading some poor bloke talking about his past vacation? Well, since you are reading this thread and you are still on the cruise, maybe you can tell us if you are a “minus” underwear packer and if so, perhaps you can take a picture of “Exhibit A” by day 7 of the cruise so we all can be educated on what one looks like? Yeah, we are all thankful one can’t smell through photos. Even better would be if you are doing a land tour after the 7 day cruise and tack on few more days of usage of “Exhibit A” beyond a 7 day cruise…😜

Ah, fellow bean counter. Always good to meet one as we all appreciate the usage of numbers on trip reports. As for packing, it doesn’t take a statistician to see that all the ladies are on the + side and all the men are in the – side. Although the men’s numbers are only as “claimed” by their partners but not independently verified by the poor dogs that have to sniff each men to see if their underwear are indeed 4 days old flipped forward/backward every which way…

Thanks again for the kind words. Please do feel free to chime in and add whatever Princess/Alaska knowledge you have. As you can see, there are future Princess/Alaska cruisers that are reading this thread now and whatever tips we can pass along to make their vacation 0.02% better, that’s what this is all about, One Princess cruise in past 20 years does not come close to making me a Princess expert. Same for Alaska. Just trying pass along our experience to future cruisers just as I have learned about Princess cruises on these boards the past 4 months after we booked this cruise. Just contributing back to the boards from the info I have gathered and trying to fill in some gaps as a newbie Princess cruiser. As for adding in humor to the writing, besides all my faults (which my wife will be more than happy to list them in detail), I get bored easily with my ADHD. Such that it’s hard to read long trip reports so sometimes humor helps. There’s old saying – treat others the way you would want to be treated yourself (Think the Twitter users didn’t get the memo) – such that I’m writing this the way I would like to read a trip report myself by providing detailed info/fair amount of photos/some background music so my ADHD doesn’t always kick in. You and others can be the judge at the end of this trip report to see if I was able to achieve this goal or not. If not, please feel free to contact CC and demand a refund of your annual membership dues…😜

Thanks for the compliment. Not sure if it's the deductive skills or more it's just simple mind noticing simple things. One of my favorite TV reporter/personality was Andy Rooney and his rants are classic. I try to learn from the master as much as a Padawan can: Haven't left the dock? Ha, I haven't even left the house yet in the trip report. It'll many more posts before we even get to the docks on day 1. Between work and being full time dad, my availability is much more limited on weekdays to post regularly but I will try to post something daily. Things get easier when I get to the "day by day" list of events as pictures explains themselves. The introductory posts takes longer to write as I try to articulate my thoughts. Grab a drink and get a comfy seat. This isn't a sprint but more like a marathon and we are still in the first mile...😜

Haha, yeah, I have a special beta version of the medallion that changes color, depending on what you are drinking at the time to match color. So if you are drinking Bloody Mary, the medallion senses it and changes to red to match the drink. Blue Hawaiian gets the blue hue and so on. Don't tell anyone, though, as Princess is working on this secretly as they aim to roll out the Medallion Del Sol in the near future...🤪

So now that we have become good friends and gotten acquainted with each other’s hygiene (or lack thereof), let’s talk details of the cruise. Medallion and the Medallion App – One can’t talk about a Princess cruise without referencing the Medallion app or the Medallion device itself. For those folks who are new to Princess, they provide to you this circular medallion device that replaces the traditional key card system such that it opens cabin doors from 6+ feet out. It helps the servers identify who you are if you are on the drinks package so you don’t have to sign anything as your smiley face shows up on their ipad when you walk up to any bar. For me, I like the medallion “coin” itself. Very convenient. Some people find it intrusive but I don’t care. It’s similar to Disneyworld’s magic band but Princess carries it further with more functionality. The Medallion app itself needs a lot of work. If you are an android user, when you are downloading the app, you will see it’s rated 1.5 stars our of 5 as of August 2022. That’s abysmal rating reserved for new app programmers. I wouldn’t typically download any app/games less than 4 stars unless it’s absolutely necessary. Princess will try to steer you using the app into saying you MUST use the app to make everything functional. Not really. You can do your pre cruise paperwork using the PC using the web based info like the old days. The app itself worked about 1/3 of the time for us while on the cruise. Other times we either use TV from cabin or actually talked to a worker to get things done (what a novel concept to speak to a live person – something my younger kids don’t appreciate as they kept fiddling with the app all cruise long). I will talk about the functionality (or lack thereof) as we tried to use the app throughout the cruise. Just wanted to state the obvious to many folks on these board that the app needs major overhaul. I have read others that you can try to get tech support while on the ship but the few times I walked by during the beginning of the cruise, there was always a long line by the medallion area and I didn’t want to wait. At any rate, my kids specialized their medallion “coin” order at $5/order. My wife and I opted for the classic display as we ordered ours couple months prior to sailing. About 3 weeks prior to sailing, I saw that Princess had charged my credit card so I know it’s getting ready to ship. The following week, we received email saying the medallions will be sent via USPS and you can sign up to get text updates every step of the way. Then it was an exciting moment when the medallions came less than 2 weeks prior to sailing. Princess said if you don’t order yours at least 12 days out, you can pick up at the dock. But we are new to Princess for all intents and purposes so we wanted the medallions ahead of time to be excited for the upcoming cruise. ++++++++ Dude, stop rambling on about the Medallion, just show me what it looks like as I’m new to Princess and have no idea what you are talking about. ++++++++ OK, here is what the medallion looks like. It has your name and sailing date (yeah, Harry’s actually my real name and not BOB). Some people wear it as a lanyard, some as bracelet or necklace and some just shove it in their pocket. The basic setup with Princess logo and white lanyard is free. As mentioned above, you can pay $5 extra to get various logo designs that suits you like nature/sports teams/horoscope and so on. There’s a shop area on the ship that you can pay pretty hefty price for some jewelry upgrade like wearing it as a bracelet. My wife has her own necklace that she brought with her to use instead of the standard white lanyard. I work for Corporate America so I’m used to wearing lanyard/badge all day long so it’s no big deal to me to have something around my neck the whole cruise. She bought these magnetic clips from Ross for $1 each (pack of 6) and we just place our medallions on them for easy find whenever we leave the cabin. As the medallions are magnetic, they stick to the cabin walls very well as they are metallic. We use the clips to hang the daily schedule (Princess Patter). Yes, in case anyone is wondering, I brought home a complete clean set of daily schedule to post daily when I get to the day by day portion of the trip report.

Thanks for the feedback. Am I seeing a trend here - only the ladies are taletelling on their partners on their hygienic behavior (or lack thereof) ? No guy is willing to come out and say their wives are -3 on their packing?😇 But yeah, I can see how men are less worried about what others think on multiple day wearing the same underwear. Could even be a badge of "HE MAN" attitude as to roughing it with minimal number of underwear. I used to pack numerous dark socks for the MDR dinners but also switching to the multi day usage as we typically come back from shore excursions in the afternoon and then shower and off to dinner. In theory, our feet should be clean assuming we clean ourselves properly - I guess the degree of shower cleanliness can be a brand new topic onto itself... Yeah, if you don't know what these are in the bathrooms on the Majestic Princess, then we need a new conversation. BTW: I just noticed that these are in English and Chinese. Are the rest of Princess ships' shampoo and shower gel also in multiple languages? I assume only the Majestic has the Chinese translation as it was made for the Asian market. Anyone else has pictures of shampoo/body wash from other Princess cabins?

As I’m old school, I like to have something tangible to read instead of a computer screen. There’s something to be said about touching a piece of paper and flipping the page instead of flipping virtual computer/phone. Obviously this an generational difference thing as my college age kids are all “virtual” everything. They always look at my funny when I tell them to print something as they say “it’s on the phone”. Yes, just like that insurance commercial. Anyway, where I am going with this is I like to request hard copies of travel brochures instead of getting PDF downloadable version. Yeah, yeah, I am sure I will get 5 angry posts saying I am a tree killer and I am destroying the earth. Whatever. I prefer to read travel items in hard copy format so I went online and requested them. So if you want to do your port research, you can request hard copies. Princess still gives you hard copy of their nice thick Alaska brochure as well as the big Alaska tourist towns of Skagway/Juneau/Skagway have their own web sites you can request free copies. Trust me, there’s a Juneau booklet in the house somewhere but I’m too lazy to hunt it down. Maybe it’s in the bathroom somewhere as I like to read travel info during my visits there – yeah, you probably wouldn’t want to borrow my travel brochures if you know what I mean. Get your own copy instead…

Many thanks to all that posted the kind words to the opening segment of the trip report. Good thing CC doesn’t have “thumbs down” like in YouTube as I know other folks were looking for that DOWN button after reading my initial posts or starting to call CC to cancel their membership. I hope to live up to the high expectations some people have for this trip report but as I said above, the pictures after the introduction will not be as good as the highlight reel so expect things to suck from here on. After looking at various cruise pictures after coming home, I realize I need to upgrade my cell phone (camera) as some of the pictures didn’t turn out as well as expected. Being cheap, my phone is now 5 years old so it’s time to upgrade. Maybe I need to start a “Go Fund Me drive – Cheapo Dad needs a new phone”…🤑 In reality a better photographer can shoot great pictures with any equipment. It’s the pure amateurs like yours truly that have no clue and needs better equipment/software help to compensate for lack of technique or blame my blurry pictures on obsolete equipment when it’s just user error. Special appreciation for those that have read my previous trip reports and are back for another segment. If this looks familiar, that’s because I just copy and pasted my previous reports’ format and updated few things and slap on the new photos and call it a “new report”. Lazy man is an efficient man. I need that slogan on a T-shirt. Hey, don’t knock it. Hollywood has made billions using the same philosophy in making repetitive movie sequels after sequels based on just one new concept. One can argue the cruise ship companies do the same with multiple ships in same class as cookie cutters. Besides you wouldn’t want your accountants to be “creative” – I assume you have heard of ENRON with their group of “creative accountants”… Anyway, I digress. Unlike other posters, I encourage people to ask questions as I go along. I don’t worry about someone ”hijacking” the thread by asking what’s on their mind. This report is meant to help all cruisers maximizing their cruise experience so if you have something to ask, come on out and ask it. I just consider this to be a BYOB potluck party. Everyone is free to chime in with questions and comments and add in photos/songs. My song selection is mostly top 40 from 70s and 80s but if you like country music or rap and the song fits the mood/discussion, by all means, drop them in. Same for pictures. Throw them in here like log on a fire in December. Very boring if it’s just a monologue on my part talking to myself next few weeks versus a group party atmosphere. Just like every party, besides talking to the host, there can be other side conversations. Thus as this report progresses along, don’t feel shy to ask something if you think others might benefit from your questions/comments. Chances are I won’t know the answer as I only cruised once on Princess the past 20 years but I’m sure someone reading it will know. All else fails, I’ll just lie and say “maybe”.🤪 If someone is really shy to post, you can always email me at the email address at my signature section. I created that email alias for CC folks years ago as some people are too intimidated to ask question in open forum so email me if you have any questions on what I posted. ++++++++++ Dude, stop rambling on already. Speaking of party, I need something cool to drink. How about few cool drink pictures or Glacier pictures? It’s been 95 degrees here the past week and I’m burning. Show me something to cool me off… ++++++++++

Packing for Alaska – No, this isn’t a typical boring discussion on what to pack for your cruise. Everyone and their cousin has a web page or YouTube channel to tell you what to pack. They do much better job explaining than I ever can – but I’ll save you hours of time in watching them with one word that EVERYBODY uses - “Layering”. You are welcome… This is more a general discussion on do you “over pack” or “under pack”? The reason I ask that is as I was putting clothes in the luggage for our 8 night vacation (7 night cruise + 1 day pre cruise), I realized I only have 6 clean underwear. So I started to deliberate whether I should do laundry that night as to have enough clean underwear for the whole trip or should I just “man it up” and wear the same underwear on multiple days? I mean, between social distancing and masks, no one outside of your family will notice your smell, right? Then I started thinking even more (I know, dangerous proposition) that if 6 underwear is good enough for 8 nights, what about 5 or 4 sets of underwear? At what point do you stop? Has anyone cruised with 1 set of underwear for an entire cruise? I guess you can probably get by with shortage of underwear but what about socks? Can you cruise with wearing the smelly socks 2 days in a row especially hiking in wet Alaska terrain? How many people cruise with only one pair of sock the entire cruise or I guess if you wear flip flops entire cruise, you have 0? Do you overpack in always +1 of what you need “just in case” such that for a 8 day trip, you pack 9 set underwear “just in case”. We should do a survey on how many people are the +1, +2 over packers versus -1, -2, (-8?) under packers. Be like those YouTubers and say “Leave a comment below”… I’ll start the process – I’m a +1. Which isn’t surprising given how anal I am and with my overly conservative profession training of always having backup plans.

One can’t talk about cruising in August 2022 without mentioning Covid testing. Although Princess has since come out with revised guidelines for September, testing is still required for Alaska cruises as it must adhere to Canadian rules that requires testing so there may still be valuable info to pass along to Alaska cruisers going later next month. For us, we did the online proctor testing with OnPoint at $15/pp using the test kits from government/private insurance. The process was simple as you pay online and then set up an Zoom meeting online where someone watches you do a self test you got from government or private insurance. The results were delivered via PDF within the hour to print out to bring to the pier. So for anyone still looking on doing their pre cruise Covid testing, take a look at Onpoint Testing.

For the newer cruisers to Alaska sailings, it’s basically three options: 1) Roundtrip from Seattle/Vancouver/San Francisco 2) North bound one way cruise from Vancouver up to Whittier/Seward 3) Southbound going from Whittier/Seward. I know, there are other options in beginning of season with unusual itineraries but those are the exceptions. The roundtrip Alaska sailing have become immensely popular – Most likely due to ease/lower cost of flying in and out of Seattle versus Anchorage/Vancouver. Most of the bigger ships from other cruise lines like the Quantum class ships and NCL’s Encore are stationed in Seattle. Princess countered that by placing their newest ship, Discovery Princess, in Seattle as well. In reading various posts, it sounds like the Discovery Princess have been sailing at 90%+ capacity out of Seattle whereas we were only at 60% full for our one way sailing on a same class ship. The drawback of large ships in Alaska is that they can’t sail on the east side of Vancouver Island so even though Royal/Majestic Princess starts/ends in Vancouver on their one way sailings, they must loop around on the west side of Vancouver Island. This route is less scenic and more at risk to ship movement in the open seas so there is a drawback for big ship fans like myself. We booked our airfare to Alaska & return flight from Vancouver using Princess’ “E-Z Air” program. Some posters will say this program is not so E-Z as you lose flights originally booked or flights no longer showing on itinerary. Although we did experience both of our original flights were canceled after booking them on the Princess web site but those were airlines cancelling the flights all together. I can’t blame Princess for that although I never did receive any official email from Princess on the flight cancellations. One must to be vigilant to monitor the flights online regularly. If you see the red block warning in CAPS, that’s never a good sign… In all my previous cruises, I have never booked my airfare through the cruise lines as they never provided any economical advantage versus my own private arrangements. However, for summer of 2022, Princess was offering $300/pp airfare credits for the one-way Alaska voyages and the booking through Princess allows me to lock in a price without cancellation penalty until 45 days out. I booked the airfare within a month of the initial deposit as I found some good prices back in April at $402/pp for both flights but with the Princess $300 credit, our per person airfare was $102/pp or $204 per cabin for two. That’s a steal when considering Anchorage flights are typically expensive and hard to come by. As I will explained later on, both of our flights were canceled so not everything on the flight was perfect but as Beatles tells you, Life goes on…

I’ll come out and say it in full disclosure - Princess wasn’t our first choice of cruise ship selection during the planning stage. We had been sailing with RCI and we prefer their high energy level of entertainment and the Princess vibe is a tad too sedate for us. However, as we were looking to sail to Alaska, Princess is the dominate player and with more options to see bigger glaciers than what RCI has to offer so we ended up booking with Princess when we were able to secure 3 back to back to back cabins. Although it was a hard sell to convince the rest of the family to give up the bigger Quantum class ships sailing from Seattle round trip but having done a north bound and round trip, I wanted to complete the loop in opting for a south bound journey and the RCI offering can’t compare to what Princess offers. Here’s the itinerary (or so we thought) when we first booked this cruise. As many that have cruised Alaska this summer can attest, what was originally planned didn’t always happen. As I mentioned above, we like big ships. But in Alaska the drawback of bigger ships is they are too big to fit in some of the narrower passages north of Vancouver so for the Royal class ships (Royal/Majestic) doing the one-way sailings for summer 2022, they have to go on the outside of Vancouver Island, which is less scenic and more at risk to stormy seas. So you have to make compromises on what’s higher in priority – ship or itinerary. Many folks on these boards will tell you for Alaska, itinerary is more important than the ship. As the great philosopher Mick Jagger said – you can’t always get what you want… I will include various YouTube songs throughout the report to add some mood music. Most of these are famous songs people are familiar with but I will mostly use other less known artists to sing their version of the classic songs.

To borrow a phrase from the Capitol One TV ad – what is in your cruise? To me, a cruise vacation is the ultimate buffet of vacations. There are many ways to enjoy a cruise vacation and just like eating a buffet, people will have different experiences from their cruise even on the same sailing. Just a matter of personal preference on how you approach your cruise. For us, our preferences on a cruise are based on the 3 E’s: Entertainment Experience a new ship/port Enrichment/Fulfillment in seeing the awesome spectacle of nature Notice that “relaxation” is not on the list. Being cheap, I want to maximize my dollar value when I go on vacation. I didn’t spend thousands of dollars and sat hours on a plane just to relax on a vacation. I can relax and sleep for free in front of TV on the weekend at home. I vacation to see and experience different things. So that’s the bias of this trip report. We take a lot of pictures on vacation. It’s from something I read awhile back which has become my motto – the most expensive picture on the vacation is the one that you didn’t take. Essentially the thought is that you have spent a lot of money/time/effort to get to wherever your vacation spots are and you don’t want to go home and think – dang, I should have taken a picture ZZZ while I was on vacation. Even if you can go back later on, at the extra cost, the lighting/mood/people will be different and you may never be able to recreate the exact same atmosphere so when in doubt, take the picture. +++++++++++++++ Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever. Nobody cares. Just show me some food pictures as it’s almost lunch time. Any food picture is better than these Excel spreadsheet reports… +++++++++++++++