Safely back home from our five-night cruise from Vancouver to Los Angeles on the Majestic Princess, we’re reflecting on the trip with mainly positive memories.
We’re not interested in comparing Princess to Oceania, our own line of choice. They are two different experiences.
In 2023 during an Oceania transatlantic cruise on Riviera, we were docked at Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic, when the world's then-largest cruise ship, Royal Caribbean's Wonder of the Seas, parked across from us.
Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words.
Our most recent large-ship cruises were short Alaska voyages on Holland America in 2019, and on Royal Caribbean in 2022.
We’d choose any of them again for a short cruise if the price were right.
Let’s tackle the single-biggest negative of the Majestic Princess from our point of view. Its magnificent atrium area was just too noisy for us, most especially when there was live entertainment or group exercise sessions.
Our opening night dinner at The Catch by Rudi, one of the specialty restaurants, was very good, but even the quiet window table we requested was too noisy for us, and we canceled our second reservation.
The weather wasn’t that splendid as we sailed down the Pacific Coast from Victoria to San Diego, and the outside decks weren’t too popular, adding to the feeling of being crowded.
We did enjoy wandering around the ship and exploring, but we definitely made meals our highlight.
Our second night featured dinner at the Crown Grill, a venerable specialty restaurant on Princess ships. It largely lived up to (and maybe even exceeded) our expectations. First, it was relatively quiet.
Second, the food and service were excellent, justifying the $45 per-person surcharge.
On top of that, we paid an additional $15 each to partake of 16-ounce dry-aged rib-eye steaks from Nolan Ryan (yes, the baseball great is a successful cattle rancher and businessman too). It was money well spent.
We’re happy to admit they were two of the better steaks we’ve enjoyed anywhere on sea or land! The appetizers and sides were fine, but the beef was superb.
Oh, and we made room for the crême brûlée dessert.
We’d enjoyed a light lunch at the noodle bar and hamburger stand on the Lido Deck. The next day we decided to try one of the three dining rooms for lunch.
The only one open features low ceilings and somewhat institutional seating.
Brian’s cauliflower appetizer wasn’t worth eating, and the main wasn’t much better.
That evening we tried out a casual specialty restaurant (our cruise package eliminated the $14 surcharge), Alfredo’s Pizzeria.
The antipasti dishes were on the skimpy side.
Kathy’s Calzone was okay, while Brian’s Agnolotti, a veal ravioli, was less than memorable, and a frugal portion at that.
We tried to attend the 7:30pm show, but the theater was already filled to capacity upstairs and downstairs by 7:15. Oh well.
Every morning we picked up Cappuccinos in the coffee three decks down from our minisuite forward on Deck Eight, past the front office and around a corner. Our cruise package eliminated the $4 per person charge (all those surcharges start to add up), and the Cappuccino with two extra shots was outstanding.
The lanyards around our necks (see above) held Princess “Medallions,” the latest tecnnological innovation (at least new to us). When we arrived at our stateroom door, it unlocked automatically, especially useful if a husband is returning with Cappuccinos for his wife and himself.
It also theoretically allows passengers to order drinks from anywhere on the ship and have them delivered. In practice, we saw numerous complaints on cruise boards about the service, and didn’t bother to try it. Princess has an app, but we didn’t find it too useful; in fact, Kathy’s didn’t really work at all. We must say that the ship’s WiFi was the best we’ve ever experienced on any ship.
The next night we ate at Harmony, the third specialty restaurant on the Majestic Princess, “a Chinese culinary journey dining experience, features an innovative menu of contemporary Chinese cuisine with a masterful balance of ingredients and flavors.”
We found the décor rather bland to the point of being barren, without a hint of Asian ambiance. This ship was originally built to serve the Chinese market out of Shanghai, and then that pesky virus arrived.
Majestic is the only Princess vessel containing a Harmony. Maybe it was simply designed as a restaurant, with no need for hanging lanterns or painted scrolls to satisfy middle-class Chinese cruisers.
It was an ominous sign that the restaurant wasn’t at all crowded. Reviews we’d read online were widely varying, from its being the “best restaurant on the ship” to those that didn’t think it was very good at all.
Sad to say, our view tended more toward the latter. The Mai Tai Brian ordered (Heck, it was included in our drink package) was probably the highlight of our meal.
The first “Chinese” food we ever ate was Cantonese, most Chinese railway workers and other immigrants to North America having arrived from southern China, and we still love this traditional cuisine, which can be roughly described as mild and subtle, as opposed to mouth-tingling Szechuan or Hunan dishes.
Harmony’s offerings, however, struck us as bland and downright blah. The Hot and Sour Soup with which we started our meal, tasted like a decent cabbage soup, neither spicy (hot) nor sour.
From there it went downhill. The remainder of the meal was a genuine disappointment, and we definitely begrudged the $45 per-person surcharge. We ordered Kung Pao Chicken, Mongolian Beef, Szechuan Green Beans (all traditionally spicy), and Cantonese Chow Mein. The chow mein was just as spicy as the other dishes, which is to say not at all.
The service was friendly and attentive, but a waiter can only deliver what the kitchen provides.There were easily hundreds of Chinese passengers aboard, but it was significant to us that none of them were dining in Harmony.
Oh well. Such experiences make us appreciate great dining experiences all the more.
The next morning found us docked in San Diego across from LaunchPad, Mark Zuckerberg’s 387-foot yacht, costing him around $300 million to buy. It supposedly is accompanied by Wingman, a 220-foot support vessel.
If you look closely, you’ll spot a cleaning crew on the forward deck, keeping everything, ah, shipshape.
Docking in a U.S. port on the penultimate day of our cruise enabled passengers and crew to go through U.S. Immigration and Customs.
As a result of poor weather for much of our voyage, we docked about an hour late and Immigration inspectors came aboard to process passengers and crew. We had no great desire to disembark, and for some reason we’d never been assigned a group. We relaxed on a quiet ship as others in groups 1 through 20 (or so) took their turns lining up over several hours. We strolled by at one point to see a queue that stretched along much of the ship.
We returned to Alfredo’s Pizza and relaxed over decent pizzas and a glass of wine.
Finally the call came for any passengers who hadn’t yet reported to Immigration to do so. We strolled into the room with absolutely no wait and reported to a friendly immigration inspector with our glasses of wine still in hand. Fortunately he wasn’t offended and processed us quickly. By now it was well after 2:00 pm, the longest immigration process we’ve ever seen on a ship. We hope none of our fellow passengers had early plans ashore.
Our final dining experience on fifth night of our cruise was at Crown Grill. We asked for the same friendly waiter, Francis from India, and he took care of us nicely.
We started with soup this time. Francis managed to obtain a “Black and Blue Onion Soup” for Kathy with the “Blue” – cheeses to which she’s allergic – removed. She enjoyed it and Brian’s seafood bisque was also tasty.
We ordered the Nolan Ryan Ribeyes again, and they were almost as delicious as they were on our first visit.
We were stuffed (we couldn’t finish our steaks despite valiant efforts and had an early morning planned, so we skipped the dessert and finished our packing.
We were up early enough Thursday morning to walk off the ship around 7:30 am with a few hundred other passengers able to transport their own luggage. Our 11:20 am flight was before the flight times approved by Princess, so we simply called a Lyft (cheaper that day than Uber), and lined up in a well organized waiting area just off the ship.
Carlos Alfredo drove us through some fairly heavy freeway traffic to LAX in a little over an hour. There wasn’t much change from a hundred bucks, but it was cost-effective and efficient.
We had ample to time to relax in Alaska’s LAX Lounge before boarding our 11:20 am LAX-SEA flight. Although we didn’t get upgraded (hardly anyone seems to be on Alaska these days), we found ourselves with an empty middle seat in Premium Economy, making it almost as comfortable as First.
After a three-hour layover at SEA, again in an Alaska Lounge, we flew the 127 miles up to Vancouver in a fairly new EMB175, enjoying views of the San Juan (American) / Gulf (Canadian) Islands in the twilight.
YVR was deserted at 6:45 pm. We zipped through NEXUS without any lineup, a Park’N Fly shuttle appeared two minutes after we stepped outside, and we were soon driving toward the border in light traffic. A NEXUS lane was still open at the I-5 Peace Arch crossing, and we were home around 7:45. It would be hard to imagine a smoother travel day from ship to Lyft to flight to flight to shuttle to car to home.
We enjoyed our cruise on Princess. The employees we encountered were uniformly friendly and helpful. Our minor criticisms notwithstanding, it was a lot of fun, and Travel with Alan, the regional travel agency, came through for the second time with an attractive and well organized deal.
It also provided a pleasant dress rehearsal for next month’s journey to Portugal with a river cruise and a transatlantic cruise to Miami on the itinerary.
