After we’d returned to Island Princess a little earlier than we’d originally planned, I left my wife to try to rest her aching foot from our walk around Blankenberge in Belgium and took advantage of a quieter-than-usual ship on this last day of the cruise – a lot of people were still off, either back in Blankenberge or, more likely, exploring Bruges or Ghent – to take some photographs.
In this post you’ll therefore find pictures of interior venues aboard Island Princess to give you a feel for locations on this particular ship. We liked that the layouts and functions for some of the rooms differed a fair amount from later ships in the Princess Cruises fleet, but that layout did lead to some places being a little underutilised in our opinion.
The Bayou Café is one of those frustrating spots on Island Princess. The thing we liked about it was that it provided a unique selling point for a cruise aboard Island Princess, offering up food you couldn’t get on most of the other ships and with a different theme than you’d find on other ships.
However, its location meant that you had to want to go there in the evening for any entertainment, and most people didn’t want to head to a different deck from other locations for it. This then meant there wasn’t much entertainment or a long-opening bar. Which put anyone who knew about the location off visiting it. A feedback loop of under-use.
Moreover, since our cruise aboard Island Princess we’ve learned that the ship has now effectively kicked the New Orleans theme under the sofa and switched it to a generic steak house. Don’t get me wrong: Princess do good steaks on their ships. But it’s a sad move. It’s a move towards making the ships indistinguishable which will please small-minded people who fear change, but it doesn’t make the ship a destination choice in its own right for fans of the line. Why cruise on the smaller, more expensive ship when you’ll get the exact same features on the big, marginally cheaper ship? It’s just a bad move from a customer perspective, to me, but I completely understand the financial reasons for the company in churning out unimaginative clones one after the other.
We loved the layout of the Wheelhouse Bar on Island Princess. Little nooks here and there, really giving it a cosy feel in a pretty large space. And a great place for some historical pictures and items.
The next post in this Island Princess cruise travelogue series will be the final one for this cruise and will see our ship sail away from Zeebrugge on its overnight crossing of the English Channel back to Southampton.