Last comments about the New Zealand cruise

As usual, I was slack and didn't finish off the entry about this cruise.  All that was left was a couple of days at sea for the trip back to Sydney, and it all went really well.

Just a few general comments about the cruise...

The Ship

The Majestic Princess is a really nice ship, quite new of course compared to most of the ships they send to Australia. 
It was originally aimed at the Chinese market and you can see this in the signage for example.  Similar to the Diamond Princess these days which spends a lot of time in Japan and therefore shows that influence.  I was disappointed to hear more than one crabby comment about the amount of Chinese influence on the Majestic Princess; apparently some people believe that Princess has failed in their efforts to enter the Chinese market and so should remove all that influence from the ship.  They haven't of course, the ship goes back to China at the end of this Australian summer as I believe it has done once before.  Unlike any other place in the world though, Princess doesn't manage bookings for the ship themselves - they're all apparently done through a government run travel agency in China.

Food and Drink

We went for traditional dining as we usually do.  Like many people I'm really unhappy about the traditional dining times on Princess Cruises these days - they moved the early sitting from 6pm to 5pm which is way too early, but the late sitting is still too late for us.  And the lure of Traditional Dining - being guaranteed a table without having to wait for ages for a spot at Any Time Dining, or fight your way through the buffet - is too strong.  We still usually go to the buffet for breakfast and lunch. 
The food was pretty good overall.  A couple of high points (for me anyway)

• I never expected to be able to get nice baked beans for breakfast out of a bain-marie - but there you go, they were delicious
• There is a specialty Chinese restaurant on board called Harmony.  They obviously weren't getting too many bookings, as they were pushing it every time we went to the buffet.  We went there for dinner once and the food was quite good - not "Australian Chinese" food so I'm assuming it might have been more traditional Chinese fare.  Only one problem - it's a four course menu where you pick one item for each course, and Paul's choices for one course were badly limited by the fact that there was so much shellfish.  Still we had a very nice meal including in my case the nicest dessert I had on the whole cruise.
• Our regular "Traditional Dining" dinner companions were a couple from Adelaide, Peter and Elizabeth.  Really nice people; more conservative in their politics than we are but we still managed to have a lot of long interesting talks - Peter has worked in a lot of places and had lots of different stories to tell.  

And a couple of not so high points:

• I may have said this before! - coffee on cruise ships is not good. Americans love that sludge that you cook up on a stove-top for hours, but even the 'paid for' coffee is never that great.  Part of the problem of course is that they can't use fresh milk, it has to be long life, but also part of it is that I think that they don't take proper training in coffee making seriously
• I was extremely disappointed about the lack of Moscato on the wine list - well, actually, it was on the list, they just didn't have any on board.  Apparently Moscato has become very popular in Australia and we drank them dry.  What I don't understand about that is that Princess has a stack of ships in Australia every summer, and you'd expect them to be able to plan a bit better.  We mostly just stuck with cider, which was fine because we worked out that they had Strongbow so we didn't get caught up too badly in the whole "we want cider and they bring us soda" debacle that we've been through more than once before :-) 

Service

The cabin stewards on this ship are managed a bit differently - it used to be that the steward would track you down on the first afternoon or evening and introduce themselves.  We didn't actually catch sight of him at all until about day three, and in fact it seems that instead of a personal introduction they now rely on leaving their details in the room's information directory. Leaving that aside, our steward looked after us really well.

We did have a lot of trouble getting table service in the International Cafe area - it's always busy and was clearly understaffed.  And of course I was suffering from my usual "invisible to service people" problems anyway.   Otherwise we were really well looked after.


Next Cruise!
Now in the middle of planning for the next cruise - off to England in October to cruise from Southampton to Dubai.