Crown Princess Cabin D116

As we often do, we booked a guaranteed inside cabin and got assigned D116, on Dolphin deck, Deck 9.

One nice thing that Princess does is post your name on your stateroom. This was especially advantageous when we didn’t remember the exact stateroom number of our new found friends.
One disadvantage of being in a room with 11 at the start of the cabin number is that when people call you, they will be sent to the emergency center onboard because it is necessary to dial a 9 when calling staterooms. So, that meant that when people called us, they were dialing 911 and never were able to dial the final number before being sent to emergency. Seems that in this case, it is necessary to dial 99 first, which was not clearly explained in the dialing directions.

The stateroom can accommodate up to 4 people, which means that two beds pull down from the wall. We didn’t need them and they took up enough of our head space to make it seem that we always had to dodge the beds when we got out of bed. We resolved this by asking our room steward to move our bed right up against the wall. This helped immensely and gave us much more room. This is one of the risks you take when booking a guaranteed room. We take what we get, but there were some other guests who complained about having to be in a quad and requested a room change. I am always surprised that the cruise line humors such people. I personally would tell them that they get what they paid for. Maybe that is why I am not on the public relations committee of any cruise line.

In the interest of research, I should have pulled down one of those bunks and slept in it just to experience it. I can’t imagine having two more people in the cabin, but might be willing to suffer if the price and the people sharing the cabin were right.

The beds were comfy and I was able to secure a few feather pillows from the room steward who told me that only those in the premium cabins got them. I was quite grateful to him for giving us mere insiders some pillows that contributed to our sleeping pleasure.

We were much more comfortable after the bed was shoved against the wall. We enjoyed our fruit basket and the selection of beverages offered to the Princess Elite members. This has to be the best affinity program of all the cruise lines. We really enjoyed the free laundry perk, especially since this was a 14 day cruise. Unfortunately, we met several people who abused the perk. What type of person considers bringing extra dry cleaning from home just because it is free on board? Well, I really shouldn’t be shocked considering some of the passengers on board this ship.

We met some of the nicest people that we stay in contact with, but also met some of the most boorish ever. In fact, one of the nice people we met asked us if we agreed that there were a bunch of nasty whiners on board. Unfortunately, we had to agree and found it interesting that other passengers felt the same way that we did. For example, the trivia games deteriorated into some overly competitive mean-spirited events. We only joined that activity once and didn’t care to return after having joined a team with a captain who knew that her answers were the right ones. We missed points because of our “wrong” answers that she refused to accept. After the game she berated the other couple saying that they didn’t even participate. Well, I think that they were intimidated by the tyrant. Naively, we thought that the activities were supposed to be a fun way to pass the time at sea. The oddest part is that much of this nonsense occurs for the explicit purpose of winning a prize valued at less than a dollar. One other passenger who regularly frequented the trivia games, in hopes of them improving, said that irate contestants attacked the activity director who led one of the sessions. I don’t know if any fights broke out, but did hear that the ship ran out of body bags on this particular cruise. Could they have been the result of trivial pursuits?

Sail Away