Sapphire Princess photo review & comparison to Carnival

[smeck]

Fantastic review, as a loyal Royal you certainly peaked my interest in Princess.

[rubrrick]

Spaniel Lover, thank you for a most informative review of the Sapphire Princess. We shall be aboard in just under a week, and I have some new places to explore, thanks to you.

 

As you have been a loyal guest with Carnival, we have been loyal to Royal, but the Sapphire puts my DW, this upcoming cruise, a new Elite. I have been such for the past few cruises. Princess does not recognize a couple living together, as having the same tier level, if they have cruised seperately.

 

My DW has had 4 cruises on Carnival, and I have only experienced one....and, I will NEVER go back. Carnival is for the younger generation, I guess, and maybe, had I experienced it years ago, I would be hooked.

 

I love your choice of cabins. We have a PH suite, and I would have preferred the one between the GS and the OS, as they would have the best help. However, the PH's on the Caribe deck, midships are very good as well.

 

You are an artist with your camera. It does not matter, except for the individual choice of camera used, it's the person using the camera, and understanding the features, and how to use them, and you do that perfectly!

 

Thank you for a wonderful introduction to the Sapphire Princess, and to your wonderful sense of prose. Your writing almost exceeds your eye behind the lense.:)

 

Rick

[CruisingObsessed]

Beautiful pictures! We are boarding Sapphire Tuesday for a little escape, and this makes me even more excited, even though we have sailed on her twice before. I especially loved your sunset pictures, fantastic! Thanks for doing the review! :D

[cruiserlovr]

You did an amazing job reviewing our favorite ship. We did a b2b ( we got off when you got on) in January in cabin A745 and now the secret is out. The aft cabins on the Aloha deck really have their own private pool. So handy, so close and so, so quiet. Our TA told us it was a special place and so true. We sail in March on the Grand, again deck seven, balcony this time with our almost private pool and bar. Your photos tell the real story and you have captured the Princess experience so well. Platinum on Carnival and now Platinum on Princess and sticking to Princess when we can. Than you!

[dorisis]

Thanks for your review and the pictures. We spent 28 days on the Sapphire a couple of years ago on a Southern Pacific cruise and loved the ship.

 

We also did the 28 day Pacific and Sapphire is the only large ship we liked. I don't know how anyone could get so much into a 4 day cruise but Jim Zim did it and if CC gave out awards, he would have one for both his photos and text as well as his comparison to Carnival.

 

A big thank you for those posts.

[tubasteve]

Wow, great review!!! We sail on her tomorrow and it was really fun to look at all your great pictures. A very fair review as well, thanks Jim Zim :D

[dorisis]

I did not see anything about the 4 Any Time Dining restaraunts on Sapphire. each with a differernt theme and 1 speciality dish. We tried all of them and I would be hard put to choose which I liked best.

[msmoger]

Thanks for the Great review and pictures!!

 

I do have one question which is obviously aimed at veteran Princess cruisers concerning the omelet station in the buffet.

 

Is delivering the omelet to your table something new? On our 6 Princess cruises we have always ordered them at the station and picked them up ourselves a few minutes later. It's generally simple, quick and painless. The key is to order it as soon as you enter the buffet and then go and get anything else you might want and by the time you return to the omelet station it's ready or will be soon.

 

Is this a new fleet wide policy or just something specific to the Sapphire?

 

Thanks,

[luv4cruises]

Thanks for the review. If you liked the Sapphire I would imagine you will like the Coral. More similar than different. Its too bad about the music and noise on the Carnival ships these days. We very much enjoyed our Carnival cruise, but, don't think we would enjoy Carnival now from what you have described.

And, almost forgot to add, great photos! :cool:

 

I agree with many observations made by the OP. I am just off the Sapphire Princess ( Platinum on Princess).

 

I am not doing a point by point comparison just...

To be fair to Carnival let's add:

 

Carnival balcony cabins are bigger, having a couch,a better shelf below the mirrors and most definitely Better mattresses. The Splendor and the Breeze have a better Spa with a hydrotherapy pool, heated beds, 3 steam rooms, a relaxation room accessible by a private glass elevator from spa cabins' location.

Ocean views are enjoyed from the heated beds on both ships and the thessolapathy pool on the Breeze. The music in the atrium is usually soft, and invites dancing by the over 40 crowd. Yes, pool areas are loud and limited in number. Enough before I do DO a point by point comparison!

 

Just to address a few other observations and opinions:

 

IMO on 27 cruises, 6 on Carnival the food in the MDR has been as good as that on Princess, especially their cold soups, and better than that on Celebrity(just 1 cruise).

 

I am not a one cruise line loyalist. When people compare cruise lines and ships i prefer to read factual differences, with opinions being stated as such from people who have actually cruised more than once on a cruise line or ship. There are so many variables in a cruise experience.

 

I love cruising on HAL-signature class ships, Princess and RCI newer ships, but will not rule out Carnival. My husband and I are in our sixties.

 

I must add that the smoking policy on Princess, Celebrity, and RCI are a major benefit to health-minded cruisers. That is an indisputable fact.

 

Bon Voyage!

Edited January 27, 2014 by luv4cruises

[MTJSR]

What a fantastic and fair review. Your pictures are awesome. I was on the Sapphire over Christmas and even thou is was my second time sailing her, you still saw more of the ship than I did. I agree with you on breakfast being the weakest meal at Horizon. I prefer eating higher protein meals and those sticky waxy sausages were weird, the powered scrambled eggs were inexcusable and the broken up bacon pieces, well what can you do. Look forward to your next review.

[Colo Cruiser]

That's it for my review! Thank you for reading it.

 

I'd love to hear your comments, suggestions, and questions.

 

 

 

I loved reading your review.

 

Can you please tell me the officers listed on front of the patter on embarkation day?

Thanks in advance.

[houstonmomof4]

We were on the Caribbean Princess back in 2007, and there are MANY similarities between those 2 ships! (Perhaps they are sister ships.)

 

We were in a location VERY similar to where you were. It was so awesome to be located so close to that pool, and we were only 1 or 2 decks away from the buffet. Our location was a large part of us falling in love with cruising.

[AryMay]

I am in the process of doing a review of our first Princess cruise on the Emerald and also did a comparison between the two cruise lines. For the most part we hit on the same points!! My list is on post #14 of my review. I totally agree about the shower head!!

 

Although you covered most of the same "positives" that I did, I would also add a couple that I don't think you mentioned. I liked that Princess has safes that are operated with a key pad, not a magnetic card AND that Princess has their cabins ready for everyone when they embark...no need to charge extra like Carnival has started doing with their "Faster to the Fun" program.

 

Our cabin was in the same general location as the one you booked (although an inside.) I liked that we were right by the door to the Terrace Pool, but quickly discovered that the port side of the pool area was a designated smoking area. It was so convenient for us to take the short staircase to the pool to get to the buffet, but meant we had to walk through a cloud of smoke. Since you were also on the port side, did you encounter this on your cruise?

 

Thanks for taking time to do a review with photos and video. I admire you for getting it done quickly. I am trying to write my review as I sort through hundreds of photos and it is taking much longer than I had hoped. Ours was a 10 day cruise so lots to talk about!

 

Oh...one last thing. We are booked on the May 31st Coral cruise this summer to Alaska. Just wondering when you were going?

[Gingee]

Thanks for the review. I may be tempted to try harder to find a deal on Princess sometime.

[AZmike480]

This is an excellent review, thanks for sharing. DW and I have only done Carnival cruises and are looking at trying something new. I never bothered to look at princess cruise lines but now I will.

 

Thnaks,

AZmike480

[helenb]

I was with you on this cruise and we spoke for awhile in the hot tub. I'm glad the remainder of your cruise was so enjoyable, and that you have many more Princess cruises in your future!

[Croptop]

That's it for my review! Thank you for reading it.

 

I'd love to hear your comments, suggestions, and questions.

 

Thank you for posting that thorough and well-written review. My wife and I have *only* cruised with Princess and have occasionally wondered what we might be missing out on with other lines. So it was particularly interesting to me to read a review from the perspective of a long time cruiser on a competing line.

 

Your photos were an added bonus.

 

Now I'm off to see if you have posted any other reviews from your Carnival cruises... not that I'm planning to stray from Princess just yet!

[Twinsfan5]

Very entertaining review! Great photos and video. Thank you!

 

 

Sent from my iPad using Forums mobile app

[bdjam]

Nice review and spectacular pictures...its nice to read about Princess from a new perspective. Sounds like you had a nice experience.

 

It's hard to believe that Farcus is still designing ship interiors!!!

 

 

[RDC1]

The Most Amazing Cruise Deal, Ever

 

I've been cruising for a while, and I've seen some sales... and frankly, the only ones that are ever very good are the last minute deals when the cruise line is having trouble filling up a particular sailing of a particular ship. I guess Princess was having a LOT of trouble filling up the Sapphire Princess in January of 2014, because they lured me away from Carnival by offering me a deal that I simply could not pass up. You know the one... there's been a LOT of talk about it here on the Princess board on Cruise Critic!

 

To truly appreciate the story of this amazing cruise deal from my perspective, however, I have to tell you how I heard about it...

 

So, there I was, in a talk radio studio doing a guest spot on our little town's hot afternoon radio talk show. The subject of the hour was cruising, and I was the guest... brought in to talk about my 20 cruises with Carnival. But within the first few minutes of the show, I was feeling a little ambushed by the host... who it turns out had a very negative perception of Carnival and who insisted that Princess was the way to go and that Carnival was like the WalMart of the seas. I pulled out my trump card, which was that Carnival is almost always significantly less expensive than any comparable cruise on a competing cruise line... and then the host hit me with The Cruise Deal Of The Century as evidence that not only was Princess better than Carnival, they were basically offering free cruises out of Los Angeles during the month of January 2014. You can actually listen to the entire thing in

.

 

In case you didn't listen to the audio clip, what the talk show host told me (live on-the-air, with no chance for me to verify it in advance) was the amazing deal that you all know about by know... 100% credit for cruises in January 2014 out of Los Angeles. Well, how could I possibly try to convince the host that Carnival had any better deals than that? They didn't!

 

When the host hit me with that deal live on the air, I just pretty much ignored it and moved on with my other talking points. The reason for that is the old saying about how if you hear something that sounds too good to be true... it probably is. I figured that Dave, the talk show host, was probably totally misinformed... and that once I got home and looked up the details of the deal I would probably find it was full of loopholes or possibly just completely bogus.

 

So, imagine my surprise when I got home that night... looked up the deal on the Internet... and found out that what Dave said was completely true! Princess was essentially offering free cruises out of Los Angeles during the month of January 2014. Wow, they must have REALLY been having trouble filling up the Sapphire Princess to offer a deal like that! I chalked it up to the notoriously bad January weather that hits Los Angeles almost every year. People probably know that January would be about the worst time to cruise out of LA, as far as the weather is concerned.

 

There's one other detail of The Cruise Deal Of The Century that you have to understand to truly appreciate what a great deal this was. Yes, the 100% cruise credit was fantastic... but that wasn't the end of the good news. It turns out that they were offering this deal on every cabin throughout the ship. Think about that for a minute. If they're going to credit you back with 100% of your fare, what incentive is there to book an inexpensive cabin? It doesn't matter if you spend $600, $1000, or $3700 for a cabin... Princess is going to credit it all back towards your next cruise. So why book a cheap cabin?

 

I wasn't the only one to figure that aspect out... and the suites were the first cabins to get booked up. By the time I got wind of the deal, all the suites were booked up. I guess those people in the Grand Suite one floor below my cabin were not so crazy to spend that kind of money on a 4-day cruise after all!

 

The cruise credit offer on these short cruises seems to be very successful in getting Carnival cruisers to try Princess. From those I have talked to a lot like what they experienced with Princess and will be doing Princess cruises in the future.

 

It might be more for marketing purposes rather than just a need to fill the ship.

[Skai]

I am in the process of doing a review of our first Princess cruise on the Emerald....

 

Thanks for that.....In being able to re-live vicariously through your review having also sailed the Emerald a couple months ago w/ the same itinerary.

 

This one gets to play the preview.

[Woobstr112G]

OP;

 

Great review with pictures. Thank you so much for taking the time to post both. Reading you review and looking over your great pictures made me remember the great cruise we had on the Sapphire last year.....:):):)

 

Bob

[Spaniel Lover]

Can you please tell me the officers listed on front of the patter on embarkation day?

 

Captain - Nick Carlton

Staff Captain - Gavin Pears

Chief Engineer - David Morrison

Hotel General Manager - Ivano Calandri

Cruise Director - Gavin Chandler

Senior Doctor - Willen Esterhuyse

Customer Services Director - Helen Kimber

Food & Beverage Director - Robert Moik

Food & Beverage Intern - Chuck Roast

Staff Engineer Officer - Michele Mezzina

Saff Electro-Technical Officer - Salvatore Cataudella

Executive Housekeeper - Lucy Fowler

Executive Chef - Andrea Baiardo

Maitre d'Hotel - Silvio Zampieri

Occupational Safety & Environmental Officer - Tommy Christensen

[Spaniel Lover]

Now I'm off to see if you have posted any other reviews from your Carnival cruises... not that I'm planning to stray from Princess just yet!

 

There are links to my other reviews in my Cruise Critic signature... which I will include below...

[Spaniel Lover]

Regarding the safes on Carnival that use a magnetic card to open and close...

That's only on the older ships. If you sail on one of the newer ships, there's a numeric keypad similar to what I saw on the Sapphire Princess.