Regal Princess UK Seacation Cruise

After twenty months on horrible, horrible, dry land we finally got back on board a cruise ship on the last day of July, 2021, and headed out to sea for three days of doing very little else but relaxing and eating and drinking too much.

This post will cover our experience on the first sailing by a Princess Cruises ship out of the UK since that painful pandemic hit us all and locked down our ways of life. With this being a so-called Seacation cruise, and therefore not stopping at any ports, I’ll cover the entire trip in this single post as opposed to my usual day-by-day breakdown. I didn’t take anywhere near as many photos and videos as I might have done on a normal cruise because this wasn’t a normal cruise. Not only that, but with this cruise taking place aboard Regal Princess this was a familiar line for us, a familiar style of ship for us; this was like getting out of bed after a long time recuperating, putting on some comfortable slippers, and just saying Aaaah!

Embarkation

There was nothing normal about embarkation, and while the general process worked well enough – drive to the Covid testing centre, have your vaccination documentation checked, take a lateral flow test, drive to the terminal, wait for the test result to say you’re negative, get your Ocean Medallion, zip through security, and board the ship – that need for a pre-boarding test changed the feel of the cruise right from the start. We’re used to that terror before a cruise that comes from wondering if there will be a road closure that makes you late, or your alarm won’t go off, or your car won’t start, but once you do reach the port there are no more worries. Not the case here. Even after having your luggage taken away by the porters there’s still a chance you’ll get a notification to say nope, you’ve failed the test. That’s stress you don’t want. I get why the cruise lines are doing it – they’re trying to be super-careful in a world where every moron is looking to blame them for anything they can – but you can go to hotels, B&Bs, theme parks, gyms, stadiums, indoor events, pubs, restaurants, and more in the country without any testing at all. I’d really like to see the cruise lines drop this as quickly as possible.

Regal Princess Mini-Suite

We knew that the balconies on Regal Princess, as with all these Royal-class ships, were pretty dreadful, and there was no way to pick a specific cabin ahead of time, just the general type. As it would be just a few days at sea we opted for a Standard Balcony Cabin because there seemed no point in paying extra and not getting an improvement in the one part of the space we really liked. Prior to the cruise, though, we were notified that we’d been upgraded to a Deluxe Balcony Cabin, differing from a standard grade by the addition of a seating area. Okay, fine. But then we got a second upgrade to a Mini-Suite. This meant a larger bathroom as well; one with a bath. We didn’t use the bath on this cruise but it does make showering a lot easier and provides more room to dry wet swimming gear over.

And then the free gifts started turning up.

It began with a private message on Twitter from Princess’s UK media team asking for our room number (A336 if you’re interested) and the arrival soon after of two small bottles of sparkling wine with glasses. That was nice, and we had them on our balcony. That was followed in fairly swift order by two plates of nibbles, a bottle of white wine and a bottle of champagne, a box of chocolates, flowers, and chocolate-dipped strawberries. Wow! I know from posts on Twitter that a lot of people got gifted similar things, although they all seemed slightly different. There’s no disputing that it was a lovely gesture from the company.

Cocktails, Muster, Sailaway

First cocktails were taken by the pool area. Not our usual location for our first cocktails but the piazza area was busy and fairly noisy with people still boarding. My wife had been looking forward to a Dirty Banana for a long, long time. No comments, you. I asked the friendly face serving us at our table to recommend something for me and that’s how I ended up with a 24K Gold Margarita as my first cocktail back on board a cruise ship.

Muster was a different process, and soooo much better for it. We watched the safety video on the TV in our cabin – this registered us as having seen it – then went to our muster point (the casino), checked in there with our medallions, and received additional information from the member of staff there to complete the process. And that was that. Never change this. This is how I always want it to work.

We decided to grab a drink in Vines next. Vines was the one venue where the Ocean Medallion seemed to work best for us on this cruise (more on the Medallion later). We were simply asked what we’d like and that was that; no checking our names, no checking our cabin number; the staff simply knew. In fact, before we’d finished our glasses a member of the ship’s security staff walked straight up to our table asking if we could take our passports to reception to be scanned again as there’d been a problem with them. The ability of the staff to recognise us and know where we were was very good here. The issue with the passports was one we’d wondered about as the woman at the terminal hadn’t ever seen the new post-Brexit pieces of crap we now had to carry and seemed to take a long time to attempt to scan them, then simply resorted to typing in our details. At the front desk the man who took our passports away to photograph was similarly interested in seeing our new and less useful passports out in the wild for the first time.

Before we took the passports back to our room we wandered out onto the promenade deck for some air. It’s not a full wraparound promenade deck, but it does the job if you’re looking for some outside space. Obviously, dockside at Southampton doesn’t make for the most attractive of sights, but if it means you’re about to head off on a cruise then you don’t mind it too much.

We then made our way to our room so we could enjoy the sailaway from there. We’ve never been fond of the top deck and all its singing and dancing and waving of flags. What we did enjoy was not only being able to see the Spinnaker Tower in our home city of Portsmouth but also the next cruise ship we would be sailing on, Scarlet Lady, in Portsmouth Port, too. We hadn’t realised she was large enough to see from the Solent.

Crown Grill Speciality Dining

We’d booked dinner at the Crown Grill ahead of this Seacation cruise and it was to there that we headed on this first night back at sea. It’s always a rare filet mignon with the usual sides of mushrooms (for my wife), creamed spinach (for me), and fries (between us), with some dipping into different options for appetisers and desserts. Faultless food – Princess Cruises do this very well indeed – although the service was a bit haphazard, with our main course starting to be placed on the table before my wife had actually finished her hotter-than-the-surface-of-a-star soup. Teething issues with a lot of new staff, I’d like to think, and it didn’t spoil a lovely and recommended meal.

We finished up our evening with a bit of a chat and some drinks with Sandra and Chris of Brits On A Ship, and we shared some of our experiences (or issues) of using the Ocean Medallion aboard Regal Princess. Chris ended up with more drinks than he’d planned at one point as his first order had gone off for an explore around the ship without him. More on that at the end, though.

Trivia

The app that Princess would like you to use while on board encouraged people to book for things they’d like to do. But we don’t like to commit ourselves like that, and we weren’t sure what we’d want to do ahead of this cruise anyway, so we played the whole thing by ear on this Seacation. We hadn’t intended to go to the trivia that was taking place in the mornings in the Princess Live venue on the ship but as we’d finished breakfast in the buffet with plenty of time to spare we decided to chance being able to get in. This turned out to be no problem at all.

And then we won the trivia. We honestly thought we were doing terribly during the first part of it but we made some inspired guesses and took home a slew of prizes: a bag, a notebook, a coaster, and a wine-stopper; then a representative from the Effy store handed us a little gift bag with some small jewellery pieces and a pen. Our streak of winning at least one trivia aboard every single Princess cruise we’ve taken continues. It will come to an end one day, we know, but not this day.

Regal Princess Photographs

After dropping our prizes off in our room we decided to go for a bit of a wander around the ship. Having spent a week on her sister ship, Royal Princess, back in 2016 (see: Royal Princess, Europe 2016) there was nothing to really surprise us on Regal Princess.

On the top deck we decided to complete a circuit of it. This started off on the Skywalk viewing platform and took us past the main swimming pools towards the front of the cruise ship.

Forward of the main pools was the Retreat Pool, an adults only swimming pool in normal times, although they all were on this cruise thanks to everyone needing to be double-vaccinated. We would end up swimming in here on the final day of our time aboard Regal Princess. The pool was heated… a bit. It was more than good enough, though.

In addition to a (what we understand to be a very well-equipped) gym onboard there were also some outdoor spaces for those who like to exercise or play games: a walking and running track, some exercise frames, a court for basketball or similar sports, a miniature golf area, a golf driving net, table tennis tables, and shuffleboard areas are the ones I can recall. We don’t go in for that exercising lark, but each to their own.

Everyone loves an aft view on a cruise ship. There’s something about looking at the wake the ship is leaving on the sea’s surface that is just so calming. If I have to be critical of something then it is that the smoke being left by Regal Princess wasn’t great.

Moving inside and down many flights of staircases brought us to the heart of Regal Princess, the Piazza. Off from here, as you’ll no doubt be aware, are the shops, several bars, the International Café, and Alfredo’s Pizza. The bottom of the Piazza almost always had some form of live music, whether a pianist, violinist, or jazz trio. From this area you can also get to the casino and art gallery along with passenger services, future cruise booking, the photography studio, and the spa area.

Club 6 can be found on deck 6 and on a normal cruise it would be the late-night disco area. It’s no Skywalkers (night club on Grand-class ships). We didn’t check it out on this short Regal Princess Seacation because we were mostly bloated at the end of the evenings so disco dancing would have been a terrible idea even if they’d allowed it, but I don’t believe they did anyway.

Sabatini’s Speciality Dining

Our second day aboard Regal Princess included some more speciality dining in the evening at the Italian restaurant aboard. Knowing just how large those meals are we thought we might try to get away with no lunch at all, but after trying some interesting concoctions in the Good Spirits cocktail bar around midday we made the sensible decision to get a light bite to soak up some of that alcohol. We decided to use the Ocean Medallion app to order food to our table and I’m pleased to say it actually worked. Eventually. Well over half an hour from ordering to getting the food, and the bread of the tuna sandwich I chose was on the stale side, leading me to suspect it had been prepared too far ahead of my wife’s hot food. It served its purpose, though. We could have walked to the café which was a few metres from our seats in the bar but we wanted to test the app out. It’s something that will improve, I’ve no doubt.

A little later we discovered some chocolates delivered to our room (they’d stopped the nightly chocolates-on-pillow service for this cruise) and we hit Vines just before dinner because, well, it’s traditional, and we’re traditional people.

And so to Sabatini’s. If you like Italian food and you like getting value for money then this is one of the best bits of additional cash you can spend on a Princess Cruises cruise. Feedback I’ve provided to Princess in the past has included the recommendation that portion sizes are reduced to make the meal more special and less coma-inducing. That feedback seems to have been listened to because we found all the courses a little smaller – less bread, smaller and fewer tortelloni, improved and reduced sauces – and yet we still came away from the table absolutely stuffed to the gills.

Now, the food and service here wasn’t what we would consider Princess-standard. Most of the food was gorgeous but the dessert included a take on tiramisu that was offensive to the palate. Runny and rubbery would be two good adjectives to describe whatever that horror in the pot was. Our service from our staff member was as good as it could be but the problem was that it couldn’t be too good because he was absolutely run off his feet trying to cater for too large an area of tables on his own. He was flustered, sweating, doing his absolute best, and we could see that and account for it, but it spoke of problems with staffing levels that should have been communicated to guests. Indeed, a table near us had two guys dining on it who didn’t seem to understand that and loudly mentioned how disappointed they were by the whole experience. They didn’t receive their cutlery ahead of one course. Can you imagine how that could ruin your entire cruise? Anyway, the end result was that we decided not to ask for an end-of-meal limoncello and cocktail in order not to give our guy extra work to do, and that was possibly a good thing as we waddled away and got some fresh air on the promenade deck before working out what to do for the remainder of the evening.

After heading to the Vista Lounge for some entertainment, sitting there for ten minutes while the staff were taking orders from everywhere but where we were sitting (right near the front, in the middle), realising that because my wife had left her phone in the cabin we couldn’t actually order two drinks using the app on my phone alone without incurring additional charges (more on that later), and starting to get annoyed by the group of women near us who were getting a little too boisterous for our liking, we decided to head back to our room, risk the bottle of white wine we’d been given as a gift, and catch a movie on the TV instead.

Opening the wine involved calling our steward to come to our room with a corkscrew, have him turn up with a bottle opener instead and tell us they weren’t allowed to carry corkscrews, disappear off to take our bottle down to a bar to open, then return. Had we known then we’d have done it ourselves.

The movie we watched was Wonder Woman 1984 and my advice to you if you’ve not seen it is to continue to not see it for as long as you live.

Final Sea Day

Our morning on the final sea day aboard Regal Princess saw us return to the trivia in the Princess Live lounge after breakfast and win it again. We declined the offered prize as we’d won pretty much everything they had to give away the day before. The important thing was that we’d won.

We were distracted by dolphins for a bit from our balcony before taking the plunge and going for a swim in the lightly-heated Retreat Pool. It had been about two years since my wife had last had a swim – not so long for me as I solely braved the pool in Kos the year before – and it was lovely to get back in the water and spend half an hour swimming laps.

After our swim we entered full relaxation mode on our balcony with our books. There was enough sun at times to send us scurrying for sun cream. The balconies on Regal Princess, as mentioned, are not great. The depth of the balcony means you have to sit upright if you’re facing outwards to the sea, while the round table took up so much space that squeezing past it was annoying, and if you’d wanted to turn your chair sideways to use the foot stool then you could only do so by blocking off the doorway to the room. Despite that, we enjoyed being out on the balcony; we always do.

As the afternoon rolled around we headed towards the Piazza area for a drink first – in Bellini’s, where we had some fabulous service – and a bit of people-watching while we read, then walked the few metres across to Alfredo’s for some freshly-made pizza. Service here again was superb, and the food was just amazing, and especially so when you consider it’s included at no additional cost. We had a great seat by the window and followed up our fantastic pizzas with some proper tiramisu to try to take away the memory of the previous night.

A bit more reading and one more cocktail in Bellini’s finished up our afternoon.

Alfredo’s was very filling so we decided not to bother with any dinner, figuring if we needed to snack on something there’d be plenty of chances to do so. We took in some final sea views from our balcony before getting ready for some final evening drinking.

Crooners ended up being our pick for a last bit of fancy cocktails. Service here was all over the place, ranging from woefully inept (forty minutes for our first drink, with the first twenty just to be spotted by a member of staff) to absolutely perfect. We ended up finding out where Chris and Sandra were hiding and joined them for a couple more drinks right at the end too, before heading back to our room and placing an order for food and drink via the TVs while watching a bit of The Princess Bride for the gazillionth time.

Disembarkation And Cruise Conclusion

And so we returned to Southampton with some bright blue skies to greet us, had breakfast, and walked straight off the ship at our designated time of eight o’clock. Three quarters of an hour later we were home.

This cruise was just what we needed. It was great to be back at sea. It was fabulous to have some fine food and fancy cocktails. Having our first cruise back be with Princess Cruises, allowing us to reacquaint ourselves with the familiar rather than dive right in to something completely new, was a good call on our part.

But I have to make note of…

Ocean Medallion Issues On Regal Princess

The combination of technology and software limitations in the Ocean Medallion app created numerous problems and we ended up having to order most drinks with staff directly and telling them our cabin number. That defeated the point of the much-vaunted tech. And ordering with the staff wasn’t without issues either. We’re aware of rumours that the staff was short-handed in terms of experienced, trained members because of issues getting them into the UK, but those are just rumours and some honest communication from Princess if that was the case would have been useful in setting expectations.

The technology was problematic because the sensors that locate people weren’t accurate enough. Sometimes hilariously, badly so. We would have situations where the pair of us were sat at a table with one registered as in that bar (maybe) while the other was detected in a shop or, in one case, someone else’s cabin. Because you could only order food or drink to where the app on your phone thought you were or your cabin, this made ordering drinks impossible. Food could have been done because there was no charge but, despite a drinks package, there was a limit to ordering just one drink per person at a time otherwise you’d be charged. So, with my wife and I in a bar she ordered drinks for the pair of us and we got billed for one of them. When we tried to order drinks separately only one of us was registered in that bar so we couldn’t do that either. That failure to allow a person to order drinks for other people in their group also means that if Princess want people to use this tech then they also want everyone to carry their phone with them at all times. Not great for the evenings if you’re female and lacking trouser pockets, not wanting to carry a handbag, etc. as we discovered.

The app software also just listed the core drinks available, but individual bars would have their own menus that could be viewed by scanning a QR code. Viewed, yes, but ordered using the tech, no. This might be a design choice, to use the tech when somewhere else while relying on staff when in an actual bar, but that wasn’t the impression I got from all the promotional blurb.

The app itself was also horribly bloated, slow, and power-draining for phones, thanks to the animations for the daily planner in particular.

On the plus side, the door-unlocking as you approached your room worked well every time, even if the purported benefit of not needing to use your hands is a lie since the door handle still needs to be pushed down in order to enter your room.

I expect things are better in terms of location-tracking on the newer Princess ships as they have better sensor technology built-in rather than retro-fitted, but the apps needs work.

I have some app recommendations:

• Option to disable animations, or an expert mode to simply list planner activities without the fancy and slow overhead.
• Ability to pull up the menus of the bars through the app without having to use a QR code scanner. If the QR code on the table was supposed to be for health reasons and stop people touching menus then it didn’t work because the angle of the QR code made scanning without lifting up the Perspex block and tilting it tricky at best.
• Ability to set the delivery location without relying on where the app thinks you are. This is vitally important.
• Ability to order multiple drinks at once if there is more than one of you with the drinks package travelling together, and not be charged for it if you’re not over your daily allowance. This applies to ordering on the TV too. We had to order room service on two TVs at the same time in our room because of this. That’s a silly limitation.

I think those software changes aren’t difficult, and will go a long way to offsetting the technology constraints on ships built prior to the Medallion technology being fitted.

But those gripes aside, we had a lovely time back cruising, even if far too briefly, and we didn’t want to get off the ship.

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