8-Day Cruise Along the Mexican Pacific Coast and Around Los Angeles Aboard the DISCOVERY PRINCESS

My wife and I recently took the 7 night West Coast repositioning cruise on Discovery Princess from Vancouver to Los Angeles for our anniversary. We stayed in an aft penthouse suite on the Riviera deck, and had the premiere package with unlimited specialty dining and concierge lounge access. Because it was our anniversary, we ate at a specialty or experience dining venue every single night.

The service from the crew was definitely the highlight of our trip. Our stateroom steward, Chris, the concierge manager, our server at the Crown Grill, and the various bartenders & servers across the ship were all excellent and very attentive.

We had mixed results with the specialty dining. The standard filet mignon at the Crown Grill was excellent, the seafood at Rudi's was great, Gigi's had very good pizza, and O'Malley's was flawless across the board. Most of the food at Sabatini's was also very enjoyable. The 360 experience was a really fun time and had an excellent host. Even though it is a little kitschy, it offered the most consistently high quality food of the trip, and the exclusive wine pairing there was amazing.

For regular drinks, we stuck to traditional orders like old fashions, rose kennedys, and kir royals because we found the signature cocktails on the menu to be way too sweet. The suite itself was good with a comfortable bed and a very spacious bathroom and balcony. The snacks and coffee in the concierge lounge were also great, and the adult pool towards the front of the ship was nice and quiet.

However, several aspects of the suite experience were disappointing given the price tag. The couch in our penthouse suite was only a small loveseat, which was annoying since our friends in a smaller mini suite actually had a full sized couch. The tech layout is outdated as well. There are not enough outlets, especially near the bed where I couldn't even plug in my phone at night, and the nightstands only have old USB ports instead of the newer USB C ports. The complimentary mini bar setup on day one was also a source of frustration. We were told we could swap out items on the first day if we wanted to change the gin and rum for more vodka, but they ran out of the little vodka bottles on the first day and never restocked them the entire cruise. Instead of offering us a regular sized bottle to make up for it, they told us it wasn't allowed. We also only received a welcome glass of bubbly instead of the full bottle I thought was included for full suites when we booked.

The concierge lounge is on the small side with no windows, alcohol options are tightly restricted from 4:30pm to 7pm, and the food gets put away very fast. I skipped dinner one night and went by at 8pm to grab a bite, but everything was already gone. Onboard shopping was very limited too, with the jewelry store heavily dominated by Effy. And the art always seems the same across every cruise line and ship.

On the culinary side, we ran into some quality issues. The truffle pasta at Sabatini's and a truffle dish at the 360 experience tasted nothing like truffle. It felt like the ship stocked up on very bland, mild truffles, which made the advertised "truffle" dishes extremely disappointing. The Crab Shack was not worth it either. The chowder in the bread bowl was average at best, which stands out since we are from Seattle and used to much better seafood chowder. The rest of the seafood was too much manual work for the payoff. Though they do offer you additional seafood if there was something specific you liked.

The chef's table Lumiere was also a letdown. The galley tour was interesting and the food was decent, but they focused on quantity over quality. For a chef's tasting menu, I would much rather have smaller, exquisite courses instead of massive portions of very good but not great food. The wine pairing was pretty lazy for a premium event. They basically served the exact same red and white wine for all the middle courses instead of providing a unique pairing for each dish.

This ties into a broader cruise industry issue where ships try to make up for lower quality by pushing overwhelming quantity. Servers repeatedly brought unordered sides, extra entrees, and extra desserts for the table even though we explicitly told them at the beginning of the meal to only bring what we actually ordered. It resulted in a lot of untouched food going to waste.

As for the package perks, the wine glass pours included in the premiere package were not great, which felt like a tactical move to force you into buying full bottles at dinner. We also could never find the reserved theater seats that are supposed to be for suite guests. For the one show we attended, we had to sit way over on the far side very close to the stage at an awkward viewing angle. Lastly, the ship uses the main central piazza for entertainment, line dancing, and group exercises. Because many of the specialty restaurants and lounges overlook this area, it gets very loud and distracting, making the nightlife feel hectic and frenzied.

Overall, we had a long list of complaints, but a lot of these are general cruise industry trends rather than problems exclusive to Princess. The service was good enough that we have already booked our next cruise on the new Star Princess for Alaska in August 2027. We are really looking forward to trying the full Sanctuary Club experience on that ship, and we hope the newer design fixes many of the issues we ran into on Discovery.

Princess advertised this cruise as an inside passage Alaska cruise.

Both north and south the ship cruised outside (west) of Vancouver Island

This led to zero scenic cruising, we did not see any marine wildlife, none!

We had 1 day of scenic cruising at Endicott Arm which was nice.

The rest of any scenic cruising was in darkness.

Though not Princess fault there was a flu or cold going through the ship,

many people sick with coughing and sneezing.

We had problems in our suite with shower drainage and after 2 visits over 4 days it was finally resolved.

Food was mediocre at best, although service was very good.

Room steward Franco was excellent, many thanks to him.

We have cruised with Princess many times, but after this fiasco we are going to cancel an Alaska cruise booked for Aug. 31 2027 and look elsewhere for other options, to bad because we had worked our way up to Elite status.

Very disappointed in where Princess Cruises has recently gone.....loyalty means almost nothing, it seems their approach to dealing with issues is to wait and see if the issue might disappear. Accounting seems to have several problem areas as we were required to go to guest services on more than one occasion to have incorrect billing rectified. Additionally, some departments do not submit billing in a timely manner. With an OBC the last night of the cruise, a purchase was not billed for several hours during which time the account was closed, the obc credit went back to the cruise line, and the billing showed up in its entirety on our credit card. Checking with others, this seems to be a common practice, and this is the second cruise in a row that it has happened to us. It takes us hours to get it rectified. Not a pleasant experience.

The dining room staff was excellent, but unfortunately the food was not. This has to be the most substandard dining fare we have experienced on any cruise line in our 40 plus years of cruising.