Sky Princess (2020)
I spent the last week on a cruise ship that would have absolutely dwarfed the Titanic, eating fancy foods, sleeping in an inordinately comfortable bed, and enjoying a chunk of Central America with my family.
I started my adventure on 4 January 2020, aboard Princes Cruise Lines’ newest ship, the Sky Princess.
My family paid for this vacation; positive and negative commentary below are entirely my own and were not written on behalf of, or with the knowledge of, anyone from the Princess Cruise Line company.
Prologue:
Last time I went on a cruise (Royal Caribbean, spring of 2014), the boarding process required us to walk into a giant open space, stand in long lines, and give all of our passport information to a clerk who may or may not type it into the computer correctly. Bags had to be positioned, cards had to be handed out, lines had to be corralled and slowly marched along. It was no fun.
Fortunately, Princess realized what a terrible system that was and have pivoted to a new system called “the medallion,” with the Sky Princess being one of the first of their new “medallion class” vessels. Very much like Disney World, our entire adventure on the ship would be made possible by our medallions: unlocking the doors to our staterooms, ordering coffees and beers at the various cafes and bars, and even stepping off the ship at each port.
Getting the medallion was fairly painless: I downloaded the Princess app to my phone, made an account, filled in my personal info, selected the accessory I wanted for my medallion (a sports band, like the one my watch has), and 10 days later a tiny Nickel-sized piece of metal with two magnets and an RFID chip appeared in the mail.
Through the app I was also able to upload my passport info, which meant that my medallion had that much more data encoded to it, which massively helped the embarkation process.
Like Disney, Princess also provided luggage tags for our suitcases, but those could only be created/accessed via their website.
So I logged into their site and...
No, I didn’t. I couldn’t.
It turns out their site and their apps don’t talk. All of that data that I’d uploaded to the app? Good for my medallion. Pre-customs clearance, bag tag, and all other cruise-critical information that Princess needed about me all had to be re-loaded for a completely separate system.
As my sister surmised, there must have been multiple development teams working on the site and various apps, because all of them utilized different interfaces and none of them talked to each other.
I suppose this could have been a “lets incubate a bunch of options to see which one works best and go with that” kinda deal, but it seems like a lot of work that could have easily been avoided by simply hiring one team to work down a list.
Also well before boarding: there is completely separate company called Shore Excursions. Their sole business function is to track all the cruise ships in the Caribbean, figure out when and where every single one of them is porting, and provide you, the passenger, with a myriad of options for activities you could do on shore. Every single at-port day I looked at listed some two-dozen options that they had contracted with the various excursion companies at those ports. My dad booked three of the four days for family things, and one of those days Megan and I went out on our own.
While I never met anyone from the Shore Excursions company, the directions they listed on their eTickets (which had to get printed out anyway) all perfectly explained where we needed to go and when in order to catch our rides to the various entertainment locations.
4 January - Departure
With the bag tags printed from the website and appropriately folded and stapled around the handles of our suitcases, a shuttle dropped us off at Port Everglades, Florida, where we left our baggage with a handler and wandered into the processing center.
The processing system was so very smooth. With my medallion on my wrist, I tapped at three locations, each one checking various and particular details about who I was and what information I had uploaded. There were employees with computers available to add or adjust info as necessary, but none of that applied to me. Walking through the building and stopping at the various checkpoints was almost as fast as if I had simply walked through without stopping at all. Seriously: they have this down to an art and we got “in” faster than we did on our first day at Disney.
Lunch was at a buffet on Deck 16 with generic, but tasty, American style lunch foods.
Then Megan, my siblings, and I decided to explore:
Decks 8-15 were all crew and guest cabins, so there was nothing there for us.
Decks 5-7 had what Princess called “The Piazza” - a town-square type area with an open floor on Deck 5 and walkway balconies on 6 and 7 from which you could look down. There were jewelry and convenience stores, cafes, small restaurants, customer service desks, and seating areas all throughout, with a musical dais just off-center from the open area that was constantly used by one of the professional music teams on board. I’m sure I’m missing some, but I counted a string quartet, a guitar soloist, a steel-drummer, and a DJ, all of whom took turns playing music there in the Piazza and a few other spots on board.
The Sky Princess also had a stage theater, three full-sized restaurants, a casino, a jazz lounge, two relaxation lounges, and a more, all at alternating parts of those three decks.
Deck 16 had the buffet restaurant, two pools (four, depending on how you want to qualify hot tubs), and an outstanding outside, covered seating area.
Deck 17 had a very well-stocked gym.
Deck 18 had a 1/7th mile walking track, a sports court completely covered in netting, and an Escape Room that I never figured out how to get into, which feels pretty ironic.
Somewhere in there we returned to Deck 11 to find our stateroom: B627.
My folks, siblings, and grandparents were in the three rooms surrounding us, and our balconies all connected, which made for a very convenient, private group hangout space.
My room was about as big as the one I had when I was deployed to Iraq (but this had a bigger bed), and with the added bonus of having a full, dedicated bathroom! Shelving was provided and our suitcases fit under the bed, so I had zero issues with storage space.
Every night aboard the ship at 1830 and 2030 there were live shows in the theater (the latter simply being a repeat of the former). As we had a standing dinner reservation for 1945, we went to 1830 showings nightly.
Each one was outstanding. Truly magnificent. They would have all been worth paying for, but thankfully were included in our ticket price.
Our first night was “A Tribute to the Kings and Queens of Rock,” where a singer dressed appropriately punk-rock sang her favorite music from the last 75 years, going as far back as the original “Ain’t Nothin’ But A Hound Dog” by Big Mama Thornton.
At dinner we met our spectacular waiters, Raymond and Erika, who were charming and friendly and incredibly personable the entire time. By the second or third night they knew all of our names and our favorite meal types and other quirks (eg: medium-rare steak, milk in a wine glass). And, watching how other wait staff interacted with other tables, it was clear we got a pair of superstars.
I didn’t keep any record of what I ate for each meal, but all of it was the quality you’d expect at a 5-star restaurant. Every meal started with bread rolls, then menu options of an appetizer, soup or salad, antipasta, main course, and dessert. Alcohol was extra, but as I don’t drink wine or beer, that wasn’t a problem for me. Everything on the menu changed nightly, though there was a listing of main course options that stayed the same in case none of the specials caught your interest. I saw a salmon dish that would have been my backup if I’d needed it, but every night’s rotating list was so good that I never deferred to it.
Somewhere after 2200, we all wandered off to bed and I slept like a rock.
The beds were so very comfortable, there were down pillows and a down comforter, and the curtains were solid black-out. I haven’t slept so well or so soundly in a very long time.
5 January - At Sea
Megan and I started our morning by doing nothing. We purposefully didn’t buy the “MedallionNet” internet package for the voyage, using the week as our chance to unplug as much as possible.
We wandered the ship some more to get more familiar with it, ate lunch, found the rest of the family, played card games, then had to go get ready for dinner and the show.
Saturday was the first of two “formal” nights, so we all got dressed up in suits and gowns and fancy shoes before heading to the theater.
Comedian Robbie Printz was the show runner for the evening, regaling us with side-splitting jokes about fatherhood, marriage, and general shenanigans about his life. His comedy was geared more towards the Boomer and Gen X generations, but there was enough stuff that’s consistent across ages that even my younger siblings found him hilarious.
We got a few professional pictures from one of the cruise photographers before dinner, since it is rare for all of us to get together and be dressed up.
After dinner every night, there was a game show in one of the lounges, hosted by Cruise Director Alexander Yepremian. Some of them were trivia style, others would invite a guest to the stage to talk to Alexander and his co-hosts. They were always entertaining.
Collectively, we went to four of the six optional game shows during our week.
6 January - Costa Maya
Our first tourist port was at Costa Maya, Mexico. The ship dumped us out on a pier right into the most aggressive tourist trap I’ve ever seen.
Were I not a jaded 20-something world-tourist, the trap would have been overwhelming and I probably would have spent a lot of money on a lot of kitschy things I didn’t need or actually want.
We followed my dad as he wound his way through the trap, exiting it, then leading us into ‘town.’ We kept going, and going, and going, to the point where I was concerned that we were lost and may or may not get mugged.
We ended up at a ramshackle storefront that looked like it was squatting in another business’s carcass; we boarded a 15-passenger travel van that looked very new, and spent the hour drive to an archaeological site listening to our divemaster-turned-archeologist tell us the history of the Mayan people.
As I have approximately zero knowledge of any Central American histories, this was a fascinating monologue to get to listen to.
The ruins were cool, as was the continued narration.
That said: I grew up seeing old rocks all over the world, so at this point, the major selling point of piles of stone is how they happen to be arranged at any given location.
The Mayans were apparently big fans of terraforming the forest around them, which included making giant stone platforms on which to build giant stone pyramids. It was a very MineCraft-type structure to build, and I can definitely appreciate that.
Our tour got us back to port in time for Megan to find a ceramic plate to add to our collection, then leave me to haggle the price (I got it down by half, for the record).
As we’ve been to Cancun multiple times before, the rest of the touristy “traditional” Mexican gift-stuffs were not novel to us, so we headed back to the boat early to use the gym for the first time: it was a gym, and it did the things I’d expect from a gym. The machines worked and there were disinfectant wipes for when I was done.
The show for the evening was a Canadian musical duo who played the guitar and fiddle, billed as a comedy routine.
While their music was good, there was only one thing I could maybe qualify as a joke, so I think the staff was having a hard time figuring out how to bill this troupe to the masses.
And they didn’t play “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” which was a huge missed opportunity.
7 January - Belize City
Something that definitely deserves a highlight: the shower in the bathroom always had hot water immediately. The temperature was selected by a knob with the degrees in Celsius on it, while the actual on/off pressure knob was separate, so once you decided at what temperature you liked your water, that’s what you got all the time, every time.
How cool is that?!
Anyway: We stopped in Belize for the day. The port in Belize City was too shallow for cruise ships to dock to, so we anchored offshore about two miles away and little boats came up to shuttle passengers back and forth.
This morning we were on the first of those little boats (‘tenders’) as we had a plane to catch!
A 20-minute boat ride, a 15-minute shuttle ride, and a 15-minute flight later and we were on San Pedro Island, one of a number of small islands off the coast of Belize, owned by Belize, where people live and work, accessible by small boat or small plane.
The Cessna Caravan that took us from Belize City to San Pedro Island
On the island, we found our excursion guide who led us to our boat for our two-stop snorkeling tour: The first stop was around the reef, giving us a great view of lots of brain coral and small fish (and an octopus!), while the second stop was for us to swim with nurse sharks. The crew released some kind of food into the water (not chum, maybe fruit?), which the sharks were attracted to, so they swam about five feet below us, giving us a pretty cool view. A few stingrays passed by too, but they were far less numerous than the sharks.
When we returned to shore, we had a few hours to kill before our trip back to the mainland, so we got lunch at a restaurant (owned by a Canadian), ice cream at an ice cream parlor (owned by an American) and stopped at a few tourist shops.
Back on the mainland, Megan and I both got new shirts before boarding another shuttle boat back to the Sky Princess, just in time before a rainstorm hit.
Robbie Printz was back on for a second go, building on his previous routine. It was funny enough, but somehow crossed the line into “too much of a good thing” and came out the other end less funny.
While his jokes about ‘family problems’ had a definite air of hyperbole and satirization, many of his bits would focus around one item for long enough that I got the impression that he’s probably not a fun person to be married to or live with.
It wasn’t helped by the elderly buffoon next to me who kept heckling him over nitpicky details, like the exact answer to math equations.
My dad, brother, Megan, and I all decided to try blackjack that evening, as my brother had never played at a casino before. He lost his cash, dad doubled his, and Megan and I both stayed level.
8 January - Roatan
I have never seen anywhere so green before, and I grew up in the U.S. Midwest and east coast regions.
Honduras is gorgeously green, as if the whole place were made out of brilliant emeralds. It’s absolutely beautiful.
Megan and I set out on our own for this one. I’d found a three-stop snorkeling tour for us to go on while my parents and siblings went SCUBA diving.
Following the directions from Shore Excursions, we left the tourist trap, walked up a hill, walked down a hill, and found ourselves facing a crowd of people all shouting the names of their tours. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought they were a particularly poorly arranged group of huskers.
A man from the tourist trap, who clearly existed on this side of the hill to help people find their tour, asked me who I was looking for. I said “Christopher Alonzo,” which the man echoed into the crowd, and another man stepped out and immediately called “Alexander?!” to me. As I got closer, the then asked, “three stop snorkel?”
Clearly, he wasn’t some random dude who just decided to speak up, so we got in his car.
He drove us to another side of the island, talking to us about features and details and weird quirks of Roatan (like the government-approved monopoly that the power company had), then dropped us off at Christopher Alonzo’s tourist attraction: snorkel tours.
Initially we waited a few minutes on the assumption that more guests would be arriving, but none did, so Christopher Alonzo himself ushered us onto one of the boats with a snorkel guide and a driver and we were off!
First stop was a sandy-bottomed stretch to stare at starfish. As the guide said “once you’ve seen one, they all look the same.” He was correct.
Second stop was to view the reef and the drop off. A majority of the reef was in 2-10-foot-deep water, but the drop off just... went. The water was crystal clear, but water has a viewing limit, so we stared into the unwelcoming depths of the deep for a few seconds before turning and following the ledge back to the boat.
Third stop was another reef with a wrecked and rusty boat sitting on top. Parts of the boat were underwater with coral growing over while parts were sticking up well above the water level, giving us a clear guide for what to swim around.
Upon returning to the island, we got a complimentary lunch from the included restaurant, then watched our boat go back out to sea with a crammed-in crowd of 20 other tourists.
The view we had at Christopher Alonzo tours before we had our snorkel trip
Shortly after lunch, we got a ride back to the port. We showered, changed, and returned to the tourist trap area, hoping to see something that would be worth buying as a memento.
Megan got a shirt.
Our entertainer for the evening was a Swedish Broadway-trained singer named Heidi Karlsson. Take a minute to check her out on YouTube.
Her singing was beautiful.
She has a vocal range that rivals Idina Menzel (Elsa, from “Frozen”) and even belted out “Let It Go” for us. She did a rendition of “Memories” from “Cats” that put Jennifer Hudson (from the movie) and Elaine Paige (from the stage production) to shame.
Afterward, my sister pointed out that some of her songs were sung with the wrong emotional tone, noting out that a sad song was done happily, while a happy song was a bit somber. My sister loves/critiques Broadway the way I do movies, and thus knew what to look for, so I have to trust her on those points.
That said: hearing her sing was incredible and I’d love to listen to her perform again.
9 January - Cozumel
In a pleasant change of pace, our last day at port was in Cozumel, Mexico.
While the eight cruise ships that docked all disgorged their 20,000-something passengers, my dad had had the foresight to book us a handful of slots at a ‘private’ beach resort that only accepted a set number of guests per day and required a reservation to get in.
And so, we sat on the beach for a day, just relaxing and enjoying the sand between our toes.
Unfortunately, the resort had a limit to their operating hours, so we couldn’t stay all day, even though our ship was in port until 2100 that evening.
We returned to the Sky Princess around 1700. Megan and I got a quick workout in, then returned to the tourist trap for yet another shot at finding some keepsakes.
Megan got another shirt.
The show for the evening was a ‘local dance’ group that apparently showed off “traditional” Mexican dancing. Megan and I weren’t feeling it in the slightest, so we skipped it in favor of our shopping trip.
Dinner was great, again, as Raymond and Erika continued to impress.
Megan, my brother, and I tried the casino again. Megan doubled her stake, I stayed the same, and my brother lost his.
The Sky Princess at night, docked in Cozumel, Mexico
10 January - At Sea
With no alarms to worry about because we had nowhere to be at any given time, Megan and I just slept. I think we were out for a solid 8 hours before my internal clock woke me up, so I just laid in bed reading, waiting for Megan.
Somewhere in the late morning we finally rolled out of bed and went to the gym, showered, and found my family for a late breakfast/early lunch.
We played card games and chatted the afternoon away, occasionally asking a passing waiter for a drink.
The ship’s bars did have Angry Orchard, which I appreciate, but I don’t drink a lot, so that was only marginally useful.
The major task for the day was packing: our suitcases had to be zipped up and sitting outside of our room by 2200 so the porters could take them and position them somewhere in the belly of our mechanical beast for quick and easy off-loading the next day.
Then our final show of the cruise: Rock Opera. Four singers, including Heidi Karlsson, and about a dozen dancers, got on stage to power through a series of rock, opera, and pop hits, including three numbers from “The Greatest Showman” (2017) and the single best rendition of “O Fortuna” that I’ve ever seen in my entire life, complete with low-poly masks that had fracture-thin lines of LEDs in them that lit up in sync with the music.
The lead male singer had a suit coat with mirror pieces glued down the right arm. It looked so very cool and now I want that jacket.
Two or three of the songs were “sung” in American Sign Language. When Alexander Yepremian had announced that detail on previous nights, I thought he was joking.
Nope.
Teams of dancers came out on stage and would sign the words that the singers were signing, while dancing. It was really impressive and definitely not something I thought I’d ever see.
We had our last dinner with Raymond and Erika, which I’m actually kinda sad about. They were really awesome and outstanding at their jobs.
We rounded the night out with one last trip to the casino. My brother and I both zeroed out, while Megan managed to only lose $4 at a $6 table.
11 January - Returning
Our morning started unfortunately early (around 0700), because we had to be out of our rooms so the cleaning staff could turn them over for the next bundle of cruise guests.
We didn’t have to leave the boat until 0915 though, so we snagged a table up in the buffet room and had a pleasantly slow breakfast.
Once off the boat, we easily found our suitcases in the giant room that we’d originally processed through.
We all used the “Mobile Pass” app, which allowed us to preemptively answer the Customs and Border Patrol questions, as we were technically re-entering the USA.
I have to assume my digital notes were automatically transferred to the desk agent, because at no point did anyone ask to see the QR code that the app generated saying I’d completed the return application.
Weird.
Eventually I made it home to my attention-deprived cat who made it very hard to write this.
Epilogue:
This cruise was fun.
That said, there were a few things I didn’t like:
The website/apps were aggressively terrible. I also didn’t appreciate having to use the proprietary “OceanCompass” app to text my family since I didn’t want to cough up for the internet package. I get it: it’s a “one or the other” type deal, but the app was just so bad.
As a rule of thumb, I’m not a fan of being a captive audience, so “capturing” me and forcing a charge for things like coffee, water bottles, and alcohol was frustrating, as there were no alternate options.
There was no enforcement for the formal evenings. That might sound weird, but it’s frustrating to get all gussied up for a fancy dinner with my family, just to look over at the guy at the next table who didn’t feel like changing out of his t-shirt and flip-flops. I’m not sure if I want to aim this at Princess, or the losers who can’t get it together for two nights.
When shopping, I don’t like getting called at by every clerk and salesman trying to sell me their wares. However, that’s not limited to cruise ships and ports; that’s something I’ve seen all over the world.
There were a handful of “giveaway” or “informative” events on board that ended up being extended advertisements for products or stores. They long, boring, and generally uninformative, and were clearly relying on the sunk-cost fallacy to get rubes to buy something so they didn’t feel like they waste their time. The EFFY jewelry store on board was the worst one in this.
Finally: the pictures were unreasonably expensive. For one (1) digital download of a picture taken by a photographer, it cost $20 (or 5 for $80). To get them printed, you had to buy the digital download, then pay an additional fee for a hard copy. At no point could we give our own cameras or phones to the photographers to take our pictures, so the very nice shots of us posed in our finery came at an equally fine cost. At least the photographers at Disney would use your camera if you handed it to them.
Ultimately, those things above are small potatoes. This was an absolute blast: it was a great way for me to get to spend time with my family, as well as for Megan and me to get to go do some cool experiences on our own.
Disney World also charged for drinks, and their meals were far less filling, nor were their menus as comprehensive as the ones on Sky Princess.
I can’t give Disney a 5-Claw yet somehow ding this one for the same thing.
I’ll happily ride on a cruise ship again, somewhere in the future.
It’ll definitely be somewhere down the road, but it’ll happen again.
I highly recommend it to anyone who hasn’t cruised before, as long as you book your excursions well ahead of time and plan your own adventures.
Give it a shot - you’ll love it too.
