Diamond Princess Review

4.0 / 5.0
922 reviews

Back to Back to Back on the Diamond in Japan

Review for Asia Cruise on Diamond Princess
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USN59-79
10+ Cruises • Age 80s

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Sail Date: Oct 2017
Cabin: Interior

We love cruising in Asia and have done it a lot on both Princess and Holland America. We have been on the Diamond three times before on her repositioning cruises when she used to cruise in Alaska in the Summer. Those were about 20 days, either from Vancouver to Beijing or the reverse. This year, she was home ported in Yokohama with the emphasis on Japan and catering to Japanese passengers. It sounded interesting, especially since she was stopping in three Taiwanese ports, Kaohsiung, Hualien, and Keelung. We have a personal interest in Taiwan as my DW is from Taipei.

We spent two days in Yokohama and found the boarding very smooth. The first leg was in an outside cabin and the next two were in an inside. So we had to move after the first leg. Not a problem; took about an hour with help from the room stewards. Never had a problem in either cabin; everything worked. However, the TV, which now acts like a computer monitor was often a problem. You turn it on, and wait for a couple of minutes while it does its thing. Wait for the Princess logo to come on, then you can get to the channels. If you want to watch live TV, which was what we wanted, you would click on the channel, such as CNBC. You would get "requested channel is not available". Ignore that, and click on it again. It might take three times, but eventually the channel would be there. This would even happen if the channel was the ship's bow camera which we needed when we didn't have a window.

We took no ship's tours other than the bus to Narita when we disembarked. I should mention something about Security. They are there for the security of the ship, not to hassle you if you buy a couple of local beers or a bottle of local wine or sake in port. I bought a Japanese kitchen knife in Okinawa. Japanese make beautiful kitchen knives. They noticed it on the X-ray, and confiscated it. Not a problem, and they returned it to me when we disembarked so I could put it in my suitcase. We had some lousy weather part of the time and missed three ports and were two hours late for one. The ship was more than fair in the onboard credit they provided in compensation. One thing that really surprised me was when the TV quit working one day, after they fixed it they gave us each $25. in compensation for that. Not something that I would have expected. The food was very good, since we could choose either Western or Asian dishes from the menu. It was fun to try some of the Japanese dishes.

Cabin Review

Interior

Cabin IB

We picked a guarantee inside. The cabin was OK, the main difference between it and the outside we started with (other than the window) was it was slightly smaller and had only one chair rather than two. That meant that one of had to sit in the bed if we were both in the cabin in the daytime. The big difference was that we had a really excellent room steward. If we went up to breakfast for 30 minutes, it would be immaculate when we returned. If I sent out my laundry, he made sure it came back perfect the next day.

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