The days and hours just before a cruise begins – any holiday for that matter – can be very stressful. Thoughts keep popping up in your head that you’ve answered a thousand times already. Yes, the airport parking has been paid for. Yes, you entered the registration number correctly. Yes, your passport is in your bag. No, you’re not going to forget your camera again. Yes, the travel insurance is valid. No, earth tremors rarely make the M25 impassable in the United Kingdom in the first half of the year. They’re all inevitable thoughts despite us being very lucky with our travelling to date and not experiencing any major problems.
In March 2019 we took a cruise aboard Star Princess, a ship we’d previously cruised on from Argentina to Chile three years earlier (see: South America: 2016) and on which we’d had, without a shadow of a doubt, the best service and friendliest staff of any of our many trips. It had also been a stunning holiday in terms of things we saw and experienced, checking off such things as visiting the southern hemisphere for the first time, cruising around Cape Horn, seeing whales and dolphins, and ascending a volcano. With news that the ship was being sold to P&O Australia in the next few years we decided to take another trip on her before she left the fleet and were pleased to find an itinerary that would start more-or-less at the same place we’d disembarked previously (and exactly three years to the day) then finish at Los Angeles, allowing us to tick off a few new countries and experience crossing the equator on a ship at the same time.
Flight Issues
If we’re not cruising out of the UK on a Princess ship then we use their EZAir service. It has one drawback in that the flight options tend to be understandably limited to the blocks they reserve but otherwise we’ve found the prices are excellent and the comfort that comes from knowing that in the event of problems Princess will sort things out and get you where you need to be is worth it. Our flight out to Chile using the Spanish airline Iberia would take us from Heathrow to Madrid and from Madrid to Santiago after three hours in the Spanish capital. With our first flight taking place at 17:10 we planned to leave the house at midday as that would give us plenty of time to drive up, park, shuttle across, dump the luggage, pass through security, and get in some pre-cruise drinks (as is the law).
We’d completed the online check-in the day before, picked our seats, and were spending the morning of the start of our South and Central American adventure watching some TV and waiting for it to get to the right sort of time to leave the house when I got a text message from Iberia. Our flight from Heathrow had been changed to 19:35. As our flight from Madrid was still the same, our layover time in Spain was now down to just 30 minutes. That seemed awfully short, especially for people who don’t run through airports. We reasoned that the connection would have to be possible since Iberia wouldn’t have altered it this way if it couldn’t but we didn’t really believe it. We decided to travel up to Heathrow as we’d planned where we hoped we’d get a chance to see if there was any way to get another flight across to Spain earlier.
Here’s where EZAir kicked in. We’d not long got in the car and started driving before I got a call from Princess. They’d been notified of the flight change too and wanted to make sure we were aware of it. They then asked if we wanted to get an earlier flight and offered us one of two options. The first of those would have been tight to make but the second was a flight at 18:45. That would give us over an hour in Madrid and was far more acceptable. So we accepted. Our stress dissipated.
We parked the car, took the shuttle to the airport, then found the Iberia desk where we explained that we’d been booked on the 17:10 flight, it had been changed to the 19:35 flight, then had been changed to the 18:45 flight while we’d been in transit to the airport. The airline desk man was very friendly, very understanding, and very unable to find our details until he’d called over a colleague. Quite some time later he eventually said he’d got it all sorted, tagged our luggage to send it on its way into the bowels of the airport, and handed us our boarding passes. Phew! Ish.
We got to Madrid with no problem and found the lounge by the next gate we needed, relaxing a little more. Our flight gate opened and we joined the queue to board. I handed over my pass and waited. And waited. My wife and I were pulled to one side while the rest of the plane’s passengers boarded. After several minutes watching the desk clerk typing all manner of weird codes into her console she turned around and explained that it looked like our bookings had been cancelled in London and not fully rebooked for the ongoing flight but, she assured us, there were plenty of seats on the plane so she just needed to reallocate some seats for us and we could get on. She handed us new passes then looked at us with an apologetic smile. “Your cases,” she said. “I think they have still been routed to the plane. But maybe not. I cannot find them in the system.”
We’ll gloss over the security implications of not being able to track luggage properly and we’ll gloss over the IT implications of being able to issue passes that get us through security but not onto a plane. We shrugged. Maybe the luggage would travel with us and maybe it wouldn’t. There wasn’t a lot we could do other than try not to worry about it. Of course, we worried about it through the entire eleven and a half hours-long flight.
Luggage Issues
And at Santiago airport in Chile our fears were fully realised as the luggage carousel ground to a halt with no sign of our bags. We weren’t the only people in the same boat and I’d got talking to a Scottish guy who’d also been originally booked on the 17:10 flight from London but had flown to Madrid on the later flight. He’d not expected to find his bags as he’d needed to jog to get to the departure gate on time and had been the last person to board the plane.
What do you do if your luggage doesn’t arrive at the airport when you do? We found an Iberia desk and talked to the man behind it. My new Scottish friend spoke fluent Spanish so breezed through the process of explaining his situation and filling in all the necessary paperwork. He offered to translate for us but we thanked him, said we didn’t want to hold him up, and explained we’d muddle through. And muddle through we did.
The main thing you need is your luggage receipt sticker (affixed to the boarding pass), a description of the luggage (easy to show as our hand luggage was just a smaller version of it), and an address to which to send the luggage onto. Ah. Have you ever tried to tell someone with limited understanding of your own language that your address for most of the rest of the day would be on the coast, tomorrow it would be a hundred kilometres to the north, and two days after that it would be another country? In fact, if you’re on a cruise and your luggage doesn’t turn up then you don’t actually need the address; all you need is to get the incident number from the airline desk because the cruise line will sort things out for you from there. We finally got through that we had no address to give but that someone would be in touch, got a printout of our lost luggage incident form with its tracking number, and headed out of luggage collection and into the main airport in search of Princess representatives and our transfer to the port.
Princess Representative: Do you have any bags to put on the bus?
Me: They may or may not be joining us at a later date.
Princess Representative: Oh no! Have you talked to the airline? Who did you fly with?
Me: Yes, we have. It was Iberia.
Princess Representative: Oh, that explains it.
A few hours later and we were on Star Princess in the port of San Antonio, Chile. First order of business was straight to reception where we handed over our lost luggage incident print-out, gave a description of the cases once more, and left everything in the hands of Princess to sort out. Before we headed to our room to drop off our hand luggage we were given complimentary toilet bags, offered the loan of a formal outfit, and were told that until our luggage turned up we could get complimentary use of the laundry service with a priority next-day turnaround on any clothing left out the night before. You can’t argue with that.
The emergency toiletry kit was basic but perfectly adequate.
Hand Luggage
If there’s one good thing that has come out of having luggage lost on a flight it is in realising that our packing technique until this point has been very risky. In fact, prior to this particular cruise, when we’d flown we’d done so with barely any carry-on luggage at all; my allocation is always my camera equipment and my wife’s hand luggage has had a few, random things in it. This was the first cruise where I suggested it might be sensible to have a change of clothing in the hand luggage so in addition to reading material and some shoes we actually had some underwear, a dress, a pair of trousers, and a couple of t-shirts for the first time. This meant that with the free laundry service we would be okay clothing-wise around the ship although we’d be decidedly more casual than smart casual for the non-formal evenings.
Where I fouled up was in packing my camera charger in the main luggage. I quickly realised that if our luggage didn’t arrive I would be limited to taking just one battery’s worth of photos unless I could find a supplier of new batteries and/or a compatible charger I could use, or consider buying a new camera onboard. One battery is about 700 photos and for me that’s horrifyingly restrictive. There were, therefore, no photos taken on the ship on the first day other than those snapped on my phone; I had to ration my picture-taking in case the worst happened.
We have subsequently vowed to pack suitably in the hand luggage and to distribute mine and my wife’s clothing between the cases when we travel from now on.
Crooners On Star Princess
How do you deal with stressful situations? You do yoga or meditate if you’re into that sort of thing. We don’t because we aren’t. We’re like the late Alan Rickman in Galaxy Quest; we see if there’s a pub. Our preferred venue for drinking on a Grand-class Princess ship is Crooners. We saw that there had been an obvious refit on the ship since our previous cruise on Star Princess, the seating upholstery looking very nice indeed. We also noticed brand new drinks menus.
The menu was an improvement in many respects from its predecessor but while there were some welcome additions for us to try for the first time there were also some notable omissions; my favourite drink, the Lawford’s Libation, was nowhere to be seen any longer. Still, there was stress to deal with so we had a drink. Or two. Maybe three. And some nibbles.
Vines
A year earlier we’d discovered that we really liked the Vines wine bar on Sapphire Princess as a late afternoon location to unwind and keep an eye on activities in the piazza. Our cruise prior to this one had been on Diamond Princess and for understandable reasons given its demographic there was no Vines present. Star Princess did have a Vines bar, though, so we checked it out to see if it was likely to be as good as our Sapphire experience. It would turn out to be better thanks to two outstanding bar staff here who, after this first day when I showed my cruise card to them to buy some wine, never needed to see my card again and remembered our names and what we most likely wanted to drink every time they saw us afterwards. That’s top class service. They also kept trying different persuasion techniques to get us to try the complimentary tapas or sushi available in the early evening for wine-drinkers.
We were in Vines when Star Princess departed San Antonio and headed north to our first port stop at Coquimbo. From our seat by the window we watched the pilot boat alongside us.
First Dinner On Star Princess
It wouldn’t be a late night for us on this first day aboard the ship. I don’t sleep on planes and anxiety about lost luggage could only fight off general tiredness and the power of alcohol for so long. Not long after we had dinner we decided to head to bed but dinner itself was very good indeed. In the three courses below my wife’s choice is on the left in each case.
As mentioned, the following morning would see us in Coquimbo, still in Chile, and our time there, including our excellent excursion to visit an observatory on a mountain will be covered in the next post. And our lost luggage? Maybe that will make an appearance too.