Embarkation

We arrived at the port around 1:45 pm. The Fort Lauderdale port has a lot of docks, and there were several cruise ships in port. But there was no long line of cars getting into the port, and inside the port traffic was light and flowing smoothly. Nothing like the chaos we encountered at the Port of Miami on our previous cruise (this cruise was now our second).

Porters took over the suitcases without asking for tips (again contrary to the experience on our previous cruise with Carnival, where the porters were rather rudely demanding tips).

Embarkation was overall pretty smooth - a lot of open counters, no real lines. We were on the boat shortly after 2 pm. Somewhat amusingly and perhaps somewhat annoyingly, people were directed to go through the casino first thing on the ship. We headed straight for the buffet because we hadn't eaten lunch yet. We found the Horizon Court on deck 14. No lines and a good selection of pretty good food, including some nice desserts.

Cabins

We had one mini-suite and one interior cabin, both on the Dolphin deck. The mini-suite was nice; two twin beds with a separate sitting area. Two TVs right next to each other, one facing the beds and the other facing the sitting area, seemed like a bit of a waste (a turntable would have done just fine); otherwise the room was efficiently furnished. The bathroom in the mini-suites was reasonably spacious (still small, but not cramped) and included a full tub. The interior cabin's bathroom was very small and only had a shower.

The balcony that came with the mini-suite was not very large, and as other reviewers have observed, one doesn't have a lot of privacy (although it didn't seem quite as bad as some other reviewers made it sound). It's still nice to be able to step outside without having to leave the cabin and go to another deck. Bathing suits also dried faster outside. I would definitely get a mini-suite again, if I was going to take another Princess Cruise.

We had booked a "guaranteed" suite in the lowest suite category (no specific cabin assigned). We ended up being assigned a cabin in the highest mini-suite price category, close to the middle of the ship. I'm not sure if there is really much difference in convenience or maybe ship motion or whatever in terms of where the suite is located, so I think it makes sense to just go with the unassigned category. We did have to walk a little ways to get to the interior cabin (which we did select - rather than choosing an unassigned category - in order to be on the same deck), but I think that was worth saving $400-600.

One more comment about the beds. It says in the description of the room that the beds can be combined to form a queen-sized bed. Note that twin beds normally combine to a king-sized beds. Were these beds narrower than twin? I'm not sure. We pushed them together, and found after we returned to the cabin after dinner that the cabin steward had completely changed the bedding and replaced the sheets with a set that went all the way across. Interestingly, it seemed wider than a queen-sized bed! Maybe the fact that the beds had a little room in between created this impression, but it's not as if there was a real gap in the middle. It really felt like one bed that was (almost?) king-sized.

Dinner

We had "Anytime Dining", which works pretty well when one has children and plans to eat relatively early without having to actually be somewhere right at 6 pm. We usually went between 6 and 7 pm, and we usually did take our children with us. The Kids' Program only offers dinner to the children on the two formal nights; otherwise one can feed the children first at the buffet and then eat separately later, which seemed like too much of a hassle.

We never made reservations, and yet were seated without a wait, except for the night when we dropped the children off to the kids' dinner, which only started at 7 pm and thus got to the dining room after 7 pm. The wait seemed somewhat unnecessary since there were clearly tables available. (Maybe they had been reserved for later?)

The food was consistently very good to excellent - at least that was true for the appetizers, entrees and desserts. Some of the soups were very good, too (I especially liked the chilled fruity ones), but there were two or three nights, where I didn't really find a soup that I liked. The salads were pretty consistently mediocre and kind of boring (just some green leaves with too much dressing). But there was way too much to eat anyway, so having three and sometimes four very nice courses out of five still made for an overall very good dining experience.

The entree choices were pretty good every day. I had crab legs one night and lobster tail the next, and both were excellent. The lamb shank was excellent as well. The steak, which was always available and which I only tried on the last night, was very good.

There was always a good variety of really nice desserts as well. We often tried and shared several, and we generally enjoyed them all.

Our children had the same food every day - our almost 4-year-old son stuck with chicken fingers and french fries and ate a surprising amount of them. He also insisted that the barbecue sauce that came with his food was "ketchup", although it looked and tasted like (rather spicy!) barbecue sauce. Our 7-year-old daughter stuck with linguine with ketchup every night, and also ate a good amount every time.

The service was mostly excellent, although some waiters were clearly more experienced than others. But everybody seemed to try hard to make our dining experience a pleasant one. The staff was from all over the World - Eastern Europe, Portugal, Mexico, the Philippines. The cruise director's staff was apparently mostly from Britain and Canada.

We also went to the restaurant for breakfast pretty much every day, and for lunch on the two days at sea. There were two specials for breakfast each day; the rest of the menu was the same every day. The specials varied and were often just too much food; the rest was ok, but got a bit boring after a couple of days. The lunches were pretty good, but we didn't want to eat too much to save room for dinner...

We only ate at the buffet right after embarkation and also a few times after returning from a shore excursion. The selection there was generally very good, a wide variety of offerings for all different courses (including dessert). It would have been nice, if water had been readily available right at the buffet. Instead, there were some fountains at each end of the seating area, quite a distance from where the food was served. We never ordered anything from the bar outside the restaurants, and we were never pushed to order anything either.

Days At Sea

There was one day at sea at the beginning and one towards the end. We used them to explore the ship and see what was where and what was interesting. There are several pools, all a bit smaller than I would have hoped, but they never got seriously crowded. One of the main two pools was inside, which had the advantage of not having to worry about sunburn. The main outside pool sometimes felt a little cool. Each of the two main pools had two hot tubs next to it. A third pool was described as a "current pool", but the current was rather weak and certainly did not allow swimming in place against the current. There were no water slides (except for a tiny one in a kids pool that even the kids found boring), which I thought was somewhat disappointing.

In the same area as the inside pool there were two table tennis tables. Table tennis tournaments were organized most days. There were also water volleyball games organized in the outdoor pool (somewhat challenging, since one side of the pool was too deep to stand in).

We went up to the mini golf area once, but that was rather disappointing. There were no separations between the holes, so the golf balls just kept rolling all over the place.

Ocho Rios, Jamaica

The first impression at the dock in Ocho Rios was not very good - a run-down port area, and a foul smell in the air (not overpowering, but certainly not pleasant).

We had booked the "Green Grotto and Dunns River Falls" tour through Princess Cruises. We got off the boat in good time before we were supposed to meet, but somehow managed to be among the last people boarding the tour bus - which left about 10 minutes prior to the meeting time printed on our tickets. Maybe everybody had arrived early, or maybe there was going to be a second bus, who knows.

The drive to Green Grotto took some time (30-40 minutes?). The Jamaican tour guide provided information and entertainment during the ride (she even sang). The bus ride provided a good impression of some of the resorts (all fenced in) and villages in the vicinity of Ocho Rios. The area looked rather poor. The grotto was moderately interesting - nothing special really, as far as grottos go, but the tour was pretty good, we saw a bunch of bats flying around the grotto - overall certainly worthwhile.

The bus drove back and stopped at Dunns River Falls (which is much closer to the port than the grotto), where we were assigned guides to climb up the waterfall. You first go down stairs to the beach and then enter the waterfall at the beach and climb up. It was fun, at times a bit challenging, but given that some relatively old and some relatively fat people (including some relatively old AND relatively fat ones) made it, it really couldn't have been that hard. The tour guides had everybody put their cameras into a plastic bag that one of the guides carried up the falls. They stopped at least twice during the climb to give people a chance to find their camera in the bag and take pictures. This was a nice service of them (and apparently against their rules - there were signs saying the tour guides were not allowed to carry any personal items for visitors). There was a woman making a video which one could buy (kind of expensive). The tour guides asked for tips, but weren't overly pushy. We were told by the bus guide that we could exit either through the entrance or through some shops that we were warned were run by very aggressive sellers. We skipped the shops and had no problems.

Grand Cayman

Bad weather! Or what they call bad weather, anyway, prevented the boat from going to George Town. Instead it anchored in Scott's Bay, which didn't really have any facilities.

We had booked a Stingray City boat tour with "Captain Marvin", i.e. not through the cruise line, so we were wondering what would happen since there was clearly no way for us to be at the tour office (which was close to the dock in George Town) in time for the tour. Well, the private tour organizers all came to Scott's Bay, but with the delayed arrival and the tendering to shore, we got there too late for our scheduled tour (which was also offered to people staying at hotels and thus went ahead without us at the scheduled time). But they rebooked us to a slightly shorter tour an hour later and even refunded us $10 per person, because the tour was shorter. The tour was nice and had far fewer people than the tour in Ochos Rios. We were on a small boat that stopped twice, once to go snorkeling along some reefs and once with stingrays. The tour people held the stingrays and let people touch and even kiss them.

Unfortunately, there was no time after the tour to spend on the island before heading back to Scott's Bay where we had to join a VERY long line of people waiting for the tenders. There were several cruise ships at anchor, and the other lines (for Carnival and Royal Caribbean) were similar in length. Apparently, the situation was made worse because the ships were leaving at similar times, and only two or three tender boats were able to dock at the same time to load people. I think we ended up standing in the sun for more than an hour waiting to get to the front of the line and on a tender. The last tender left more than an hour after the time that the Star Princess was supposed to depart. So the departure was delayed, and consequently the arrival the next morning was delayed as well, which through that schedule off a little bit, too. But we were on a Princess Cruises booked tour there, so we were fine. As a result of these unpredictable delays I'm afraid I'll have to conclude that booking tours separately and not through the cruise line is probably not worth the savings (in this case about $10-20 per person), even though the Captain Marvin crew did a great job and may well have given us a slightly better experience than the ship-organized tour would have.

Cozumel, Mexico

The dock in Cozumel that was destroyed by a hurricane two (?) years ago has been mostly rebuilt, so we didn't have to get on tender boats. However, we had booked the Tulum/Xel-Ha Park excursion, which requires taking a ferry from Cozumel to Playa del Carmen, which ultimately was a lot like the tender in Grand Cayman. No wait to get on, because the ferry was big enough to take everybody who wanted to go to Playa del Carmen, but instead we ended sitting on the ferry for 45 minutes waiting for everybody to get off the Star Princess and onto the ferry. On the way back at least we were apparently on the last bus back, and the ferry left shortly after we got on. The ferry ride itself took another 45 minutes, plus waiting almost 15 minutes for a dock to become available at Playa del Carmen. So we ended up spending a total of about 2 1/2 hours just on the ferry! We had been warned that the ferry would be rocky, but either it was a particularly calm day, or we just weren't affected by the moderate rocking of the boat. We didn't see anybody else get sea-sick either.

In Playa del Carmen we had to walk to a bus that was parked somewhere in a street, which was a little odd. The bus drove to Tulum first - it took around 45 minutes to an hour to get there. The tour description had pointed out that there would only be 1 1/2 hours at the ruins, but they did not mention that this would include both the walk from the parking lot (15-20 minutes at the pace of the slowest people in the group) and a very inefficient restroom stop at the entrance to Tulum (another 15 minutes or so since we had to wait for everybody to be done). We then got a 30-minute guided tour and were left with about another 30 minutes to explore the area on our own. There is actually a nice beach at Tulum (stairs leading down the cliffs), but there was no time to go there. Overall, Tulum was interesting, but there was not enough time to see everything. Not that there was that much else to see, but another 30 minutes around the ruins and perhaps an hour at the beach would certainly have been nice.

We then drove to Xel-Ha Park, which is not far from Tulum, on the way back to Playa del Carmen. We weren't completely sure what to expect, and even in retrospect I'm not completely sure what this park really is - probably in part again, because we did not have enough time to explore everything. We did get two hours for the park, but with changing, putting on snorkel gear and life vests and then changing back there really wasn't all that much time to swim and walk around. The snorkeling was a little disappointing because the water was rather cloudy. And there really wasn't all that much to see underwater. Grand Cayman had certainly been much better in terms of water visibility and variety of underwater attractions. While the park was nice, I don't think it was worth the rather steep admission price of $35 (which was included in the tour price, but renting snorkel gear was extra; we had brought our own). Again, it ended up being a bit rushed; there was a beach, too, but it was too far away to get there and back in time. There were several attractions which we were told would take almost the whole time we had, so we could either do them and nothing else or do other things instead. There was also swimming with dolphins offered for an additional fee, but even if we had wanted to, again there would not have been enough time.

Princess Cays

The last stop was Princess Cays in the Bahamas. There was tendering again, which in this case went rather smoothly and without much wait (only on the way back did we have to stand in a long, but fast moving line for perhaps 15 minutes). We brought our snorkel gear again, and it was definitely worth it. There were a lot of interesting fish to see. There was slightly more to see to the left of the pier (from the ship's point of view) than on the other side, which, however, was a little less crowded. There was a buffet lunch - the food tasted good, but the selection was rather limited.

Again, there wasn't really enough time to explore everything, since we had to go back on the tender and to the ship by 3 pm or so. A little more time would have really been nice.

Disembarkation

We were booked on an afternoon flight out of Ft Lauderdale, so we took our time to get off. We may have even been the last people to get off the boat around 9:30 am or so. There was still a 5-minute wait to get through immigration, then we retrieved our bags (one of which had mysteriously been misplaced and took 5 minutes to find), then went to the taxi stand and took a taxi to the nearby airport. We got to the airport around 10 am and asked the airline (Air Tran), if we could possibly get on an earlier flight.

Amazingly, they let us rebook all five of us onto an 11:15 am flight (without any fees). We did not book this flight in fear of not making it in time in case we were delayed getting off the ship - but since everything went so smoothly we got on the flight even though we took our time to get off! So we didn't have to rush and didn't have to wait at the airport, a perfect combination.

For people who do have to wait longer for a flight, there are port excursions offered on the last day as well, e.g. an Everglades tour that I had taken a long time ago (not in conjunction with a cruise) and that might have been interesting again.

Conclusion

The cruise was fun, the ports were interesting, we all enjoyed it, and our children even didn't want to get off the ship! We actually decided to go on another cruise in 2008, again with Princess Cruises.


Recommended:
Yes