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Princess Cruise Line

MS Golden Princess

Your Rating:
Reviewed by: Warren Win
# previous cruises: 9
Date of Trip: July 16, 2003
Itinerary: Mediterranean

My wife and I took our first Princess cruise on the Golden this summer. It was a Med cruise beginning in Barcelona and ending in Venice. The other ports included Monte Carlo, Livarno (Florence / Pisa), Naples (Pompeii / Capri), Athens, Kusadasi (Ephesus) and Istanbul. The ports were an excellent opportunity for me to get my first taste of Europe while still enjoying the security and comfort of a cruise ship. But the one suggestion I would have to people would be not to do it in the hottest summer that has ever been recorded in Europe. Still it is a cruise that anyone who likes history and visiting interesting sites will enjoy and the Golden was a great platform for traveling from place to place.

The public areas of the ship are all very nice. We have been on HAL (Zaandam, Noordam, Veendam and Westerdam), RCCL (Enchantment) and Costa (Atlantica) but this was the largest ship yet. But the ship didn't seem enormous because of a passenger friendly layout that made it very easy to find your way around. The ship isn't as flashy as the Atlantica or the Enchantment was. It was more like the Zaandam or Veendam in style. There is a full promenade but you have to climb some stairs to actually use it. I missed the real wood promenades that HAL has. This one has some kind of artificial surface instead. There were never very many people on the promenade even when the ship was arriving or leaving a port. We never settled on a bar we liked so we rotated them. The service was consistent in all of them as was the quality of the drinks. The one thing we liked was we consistently ran into people we "knew" (had met) on the ship which is one reason the ship never felt enormous. By the way the ship had 2850 people on board for our cruise (2600 is double capacity).

We had PC (personal choice) dining which meant we had two different dining rooms we could choose to go to anytime between 6 PM and 10:30 PM. We rotated the dining rooms also and got good service in both. The food was excellent, probably overall better than HAL, RCCL or Costa. Shrimp cocktail was available as an appetizer each night as were several other standard dishes if you couldn't find anything on the nightly menu you wanted. The buffets, one on each side, had massive quantities of food. We ate breakfast and lunch there numerous times and the food was always good. The pizza and hamburgers on the grill were always good also.

The room we got was on the Plaza (5) deck. It was forward of the central atrium of the ship. It had a full window, not a porthole, and was close to the laundromat which can in handy on this trip. It was also convenient to the pursers desk and to be able to reach the unloading areas when the ship was in port. The lack of a formal closet wasn't missed at all. The arrangement with an open area for hanging clothes was very efficient and worked well for us. The cabin steward did an excellent job of being around when you needed him and being out of site the rest of the time. He also kept the cabin immaculate. All in all an excellent room.

We are not show going people although we did go to several movies during the sea afternoons, so I can't comment on the entertainment in the main showrooms. The small bands that were in the bars were generally very good. The band that played in the atrium each evening was excellent.

The ship has several pools and a variety of hot tubs. Unfortunately many of the hot tubs seemed to be always filled with children. We took this cruise because of the ports and enjoyed our excursions in each port. We ship excursions in Barcelona, Athens and Kusadasi. We did private tours with 6 other people in Monte Carlo, Florence, Naples and istanbul. We stayed for 3 extra days in Venice which we did on our own.

There was an enormous mixture of people on this cruise. The captain told us that there were 800 or so Americans, 600 or so from Great Britain, 400 or so from Canada and Australia with groups from all over Europe and the rest of the world making up the rest of the 2850 passengers. There were many families with children as well as a number of extended family groups with grandparents, parents and children. I would guess the average age for the total passenger count to be under 45. Generally everyone we met was someone we got along with. Doing PC dining means you often eat with people you have never met and for the most part the dinners went well.