20240405 Sapphire Princess South Pacific Cruise Day 2 - Boarding and sailing and bitching and moaning

Sapphire Princess South Pacific Cruise Day 2 - Bon Voyage, well, "Voyage" at least if not "Bon"

I forgot to mention in yesterday's blog - our crash pad, the Holiday Inn Los Angeles LAX, is also the crew hotel for Princess. We met Kai on the shuttle bus yesterday. He was wearing a Princess jacket. We asked, and he is part of the IT team that produces the daily Princess Patter newsletter and schedule. He also works on updating all of the information screens around the ship. He had just arrived from mainland China and will be embarking on the Sapphire Princess today for a six-month contract. When we ate at the hotel last night, a bunch of crew were dining from a special crew menu.

This morning was crazy. When we came down for breakfast, there were tons of crew all waiting for their shuttle to the port. It looks like we're getting a pretty big crew turnover today. They all had to get to the ship early as they needed to be ready to go before passengers began embarking later in the morning.

Our room was fine last night. There were some bangs outside the door. I'm not sure what the staff does out there, but we continued to hear it from time to time even this morning. There was some aircraft noise but that was minor. We're very close to LAX. Here's the lovely view out our window. You can see an aircraft on the left.

Here's a closer look at how close we are to the landing aircraft.

The room itself was rather spartan with the basics. Still, that's all we needed for the one night before the cruise. At under $150, it was a bargain, even if dinner last night at the hotel was pricey.

I mentioned that the room we booked also came with a free breakfast. It was a decent if not excellent buffet with scrambled eggs, sausages, cereals, breads, waffles, and such. The crazy part was that it was $23.95 per person. Yikes! Glad we got it included. If we hadn't, we had an out as McDonald's is right outside the front door. 

We wandered over there after breakfast to pick up a couple large Diet Cokes for our morning caffeine. At $3.26 for two large drinks ($4.00 with the optional round-up to support Ronald McDonald charities), it was a relative bargain. The walk was so short, that even with temps in the high 40s and intermittent drizzle, we skipped the coats.

We had some time to kill so Arlona worked on finishing up a book on her Kindle. She checks out books from our Marion County library and they have a time deadline before they are automatically returned and deleted from her Kindle. She works around that by turning off the WiFi on the Kindle, but she tries to get everything back on schedule. I got started on this bit of rambling.

Around 10:30, we checked out and ordered an UberXL to haul us and our luggage to San Pedro. Arlona did a little checking and we are in the berth right next to where we docked on the Viking Star on our world cruise in January 2022. It certainly isn't a picturesque port.

Our driver arrived in just a couple of minutes and we were off to San Pedro. The drive was scheduled for just about 30 minutes.

All went well - light traffic, no issues...until we exited the highway at the port. *Boom* - traffic. The port was jammed. Sapphire Princess and Emerald Princess were docked right next to each other so that meant more than 5,000 passengers were all arriving at the same time for embarkation. 

Hey - our ship - no, wait - that's Emerald Princess

It took us nearly as long to travel from the port entrance to the dropoff point as it did to travel the 20 miles from the hotel to the port. Lucky for us, our driver was patient and got us to the dropoff safely.

We checked our bags immediately, making the next part easy since we weren't schlepping bags. So,... a little history. This is a Medallion Class sailing. Princess uses Medallions - an NFC device that acts as your room key, charge card, onboarding identification - essentially everything on the ship. We received an email notice a while back that we could order our medallions and have them shipped to make onboarding easier, for $10. Being cheap, we passed. This should have been a red flag for me, but I missed it. You see, we booked this cruise with Princess Plus - a package that includes pre-paid gratuities, drinks, WiFi access, and more perks. One of those perks was free medallion shipping. I missed that. This will become important in a minute...

We entered the Blue Lane line for those low-class folks who needed to pick up our medallions.

It was a zoo. Multiple back-and-forth lanes and at least a 45-minute wait. We eventually got through it and got our medallions. 

Medallions are color-coded to reflect your status – we’re Gold

But...there was an issue. Our birthdates were wrong. That's weird since we both are pretty familiar with each other's birthdates. The agent straightened it out and we got onto the ship.

Neither of us could get logged into the ship's internet so we stopped by Guest Services. They let us know that we couldn't access the internet because we didn't purchase an internet package. Wait, what? We let him know we booked with Princess Plus and he said that no, we didn't. Wait, what? After some back and forth and producing an email proving that we booked with Princess Plus, he went into the back office and then came back and said he verified that we did indeed have Princess Plus. But...he was unable to do anything about it. He had to email the shoreside team and they would need to update our account to include all the missing items we had already paid for. Wow. Seriously, wow. From a customer service standpoint, not empowering your ship team to handle mistakes made by Princess is simply unacceptable. We asked about what would happen if we went and ordered a drink, given that we had a drink package, but our account didn't reflect that. His exact words were, "That will be a problem."  Again, wow. When I questioned him on that, he got very defensive and said we should just relax and enjoy our trip and not worry. I mentioned that his words were, "That will be a problem." He further stated that he would keep us updated on what was happening. Ultimately, everything got fixed, but we never heard from him again, so, so much for quality communication from the Guest Services staff.

This is our second Princess cruise. Our first was a disaster on Caribbean Princess. This one isn't starting much better.

We went to the buffet to grab a bite to eat. It was a zoo. There were no seats anywhere. After touring the entire place twice, Arlona approached a man sitting at a large table to see if he would be willing to share the table. He was. His wife returned with her food and they were lovely to dine and chat with.

At about 1:40, they announced that all the rooms were ready so we finished lunch and headed to the room. We are in a forward, starboard (right side) balcony cabin on Deck 10 (Caribe Deck) – C115. Here's a look at our room.

The medallion screen recognizes us

It sometimes requires a touch and sometimes just unlocks then you approach

The room entry

Looking right, the bathroom door on the right, and the closet behind the mirror

A large hanging space

Behind the mirror - shelves, a safe,  and life vests

The restroom - the stool - shower is to the left

A tiny shower

The sink with limited counter space and shelves

The room - modest size

Each lamp on the nightstands has a single USB-A port, so two for the whole room

Each nightstand has a couple small drawers

The corner area near the left side of the slider has a fridge at the bottom and a top shelf

That top shelf has dual 110V plugs

The desk on the other side of the slider has a decent chair and a few small drawers

There are two 110V plugs on the left side of the desk, but no USB plugs

The deck is surprisingly deep and roomy – the view down is into the veranda of the rooms below – there is a limited (none) view of the ocean – we don’t like this at all.

So we're OK, but certainly not thrilled with the room. A crappy ocean view, a tiny shower, and limited storage make for a mediocre room at best.

On a whim, we checked the Princess app and found that our internet was finally working and all the things we had paid for showed up in our online account. Did we hear from Guest Services? Nope.

Since the internet was working, I decided to benchmark it.

They use Starlink but have very limited bandwidth

Since we still didn’t have luggage, we set out in search of a bar. We wound up at the Explorers’ Lounge. There were only six seats at the bar and they were full. We took a seat but nobody would come wait on us. We went back up to the bar and ordered and then took our drinks to a seat. After a bit, seats at the bar opened and we went to the bar. Service was much better. 

I hope this isn’t a harbinger of how service will go for the next 32 days. But so far, we’ve seen overcrowded venues and limited service.  My fingers are crossed that it gets better.

Here's a look at our itinerary.

We'll be changing the time and date regularly so this will be interesting

We were supposed to sail around 3:00 this afternoon. The Captain made an announcement this afternoon stating it would be 7:00 or later that we would sail. It was hard to hear so we didn’t catch the details of why there was a delay, but suffice it to say that we’re not leaving on time. He then went on to say that for the first 24-36 hours, we can expect rough seas, so that will be fun. We’re all good with it after having sailed to much worse, but I expect there will be some green passengers by lunchtime tomorrow.

A little after 5:30, we checked and five of our six bags were outside our room. That seemed odd since all six bags were loaded together on the same cart. Arlona started unpacking as all her bags were there. We were waiting for my main bag to arrive. After unpacking the bags that had arrived, we headed to dinner.

We made the mistake of thinking that Princess supports the concept of anytime dining, where you show up and get a table, perhaps after a short wait. They do not. We tried the main dining venues and were turned away from every single one and told to come back 30 minutes or more later. We were told that to get a table at the walk-up main dining venues, you need a reservation. Wait, what? Yes, to dine at the walk-up restaurants, you have to book time in advance. Here’s the issue. We went into the app and there are no available dining slots at any of the three restaurants for the duration of the cruise. Seriously. We found one at 8:20 about three weeks into the cruise, but that was it. With yet another bad taste for Princess, we headed up to deck 14 to the buffet.  

When we arrived, we found a long line as one side of the buffet was closed, creating a major traffic jam on the sole open side.

We stood in line for a slice of turkey for 15 minutes. Again, wow. Princess is dropping very quickly on our list of preferred cruise lines. Perhaps it is all a result of this being embarkation day. We’ll see how it goes tomorrow.

After dining, we headed to the packed theater for tonight’s headliner, comedian Tom Simmons. We chuckled a bit and he was modestly entertaining. At some point during his show, we sailed. We could feel the vibration in the ship as the engines started producing propulsion power. Another highlight of the show was the interruption for the first medical event on deck 6, zone 2, near the restroom. This is an older crowd, so we expect medical emergency calls will be commonplace over the next month.

After that, we stopped at the Explorers Bar and watched the music trivia game while enjoying vanilla-limoncello martinis. 

We met some nice folks and chatted for a while at the bar. Since we had finally sailed, the shops were open. We browsed a bit and didn’t see anything compelling. We have some non-refundable onboard credit that has to be spent so we will have to figure out what to use it for over the next month.

Farewell Los Angeles

The Captain, in an earlier announcement, said that we can expect rough seas for the first 24 – 36 hours of the trip, and tonight did not disappoint. Since our cabin is forward, we also get the added benefit of feeling the bow slam into the waves with a distinct *bang* and vibration of the cabin walls.  Good thing we’re both OK with ship motion. Time to catch some ZZZs and prepare for our first full day at sea tomorrow.

Oh yeah, when we got back to the room, my missing suitcase had finally showed up so I could finish unpacking.