Pkt, I appreciate your niceness and your optimism. It was great meeting you and others at the meet and greet with my wife, Rachelle.
This cruise was an abysmal disappointment, though, and to couch it as less than that is lipstick on a pig. This felt like such an incredible bait and switch job that I'm just flat out not taking Princess again. Period. They can take their 20% FCC and shove it- that's a slap in the face as far as I'm concerned.
As many posters have said, this is a trip of a lifetime/first trip in years/not sure if we can do it multiple times type trip, and they:
a) knew about issues beforehand
b) covered or disguised them until the last possible second
c) sleight of handed when they couldn't otherwise fool us outright
The excuse of 'the tides' as being part of the reason we were going to be late to Ketchikan was laughable! The tides? If *only* we could have known what the tides would be!
I think the reason we're infuriated the most is because we basically convinced our friends (first time cruisers) to do this trip with us. The money part is irrelevant to us (well, not irrelevant, but certainly not the biggest reason for us, anyways) the part that gets us is that we put our necks out and Princess completely dropped the ball. There wasn't even a ball, they just kicked us in ours and then said here's some credit to allow us the opportunity to charge you more in the future!
Our friends spent $2,200 for an inside room, full package. So let's say they get roughly $300/pp in FCC- great! That same $2,200 again in the future would be $1620, so now they're essentially in it for $3820 at a minimum, while the first cruise was an incredible disappointment. Unacceptable.
There's just no way we're coming back after this unless they reach out and try to make it right (they won't, we're sure of it).
Mike, it was fun being on your trivia team in Fusion- we almost won!
Glacier Bay National Park is an absolute treasure and the gods blessed us with incredible weather.
We lost out on our whale watching tour in Juneau (supposedly one of the best areas in the world at this time of year) we went half way on our train in Skagway, we sat in lukewarm hot tubs (the 2 out of 6 that actually worked) and the gangway went down at what, 8:50 in Victoria?
This was absolutely a cruise- a cruise without ports. They took the money and ran.
Props to the working staff, though, who were courteous, professional, and helped smooth things over with genuine warmth and hospitality. We always appreciate the hard working staff of a cruise ship and our room steward, all food servers, and casino crew were outstanding. We enjoyed our multiple trips to Sabatini's, Crown Grill was so-so and we never got to try Salty Dog Gastro Pub because like seemingly everything else on the ship that they had 25 months to prepare for, it was broken. Or whatever the excuse was. Supply chain. Covid. Staffing issues.
I just don't care about excuses anymore when we're asked to pay full fare- that's theft.
Scrap the Crown Princess for parts and maybe consider doing the same to a horribly unethical company that just alienated two of our friends as well as ourselves from ever cruising with them again.
On to Celebrity and back on to HAL.