Mexican Riviera Cruise: the ship, Dawn Princess

By Jim (Biscuit Boy)

We boarded the Dawn Princess on Sunday. This ship was christened in 1997 by members of the Love Boat cast. Yes, there is a Lido Deck. Yes, there is shuffleboard on the Lido Desk. Unfortunately, Julie wasn’t our cruise director.

I’ll be making a lot of comparisons in this to our cruise on Celebrity’s Mercury in 2005; Barbara wrote about it at the time. The short answer is that it wasn’t as nice, wasn’t as pampering as the one on the Mercury.

The formalities were easy: someone took our bags, we got our passports scanned and our credit card swiped for our onboard account, got our card keys (used for our cabin locks and purchasing drinks and other things on board), and boarded and headed to our cabin. The minisuite was sweet.

Living Room

Bedroom

Bathtub

Separate shower

Toilet

Efrain, our cabin steward, took good care of us. Our first meeting was when he stopped by and welcomed us onboard with a glass of champagne. He was the best of the staff that we encountered on the cruise. He made sure we knew how to get in touch with him, and he was there to take care of us. He was from Acapulco, and I wish we had gone there just so he could have told us the best places to go there. Our dinner waiters were nice, but didn’t come close. The dining room didn’t have sommeliers, so we were ordering drinks from our waiters.

The food onboard was OK, sometimes very good, sometimes meh. We had heard that beef onboard wasn’t that good. This was not the case. Fish and shrimp were more likely to be crummy. I’d recommend most anything over the fish, which was typically overcooked and tasted frozen. I love fish, I cook it at home frequently, and will order it when out over about anything else, but not on this trip.

Below are night two-Cabo dinner pics. Night one, we forgot our camera.


Crab Quiche - o.k.

Smoked duck breast - good


Crawfish - OK, although our tablemates from New Orleans didn't order it.


Pasta with Veal Sauce - meh.

The pizza parlor on board made very good pizzas. The dough tasted like it was made fresh that day. Unfortunately, everyone else figured this out as well and waiting times for lunch took time, like 20-30 minutes. Lunch, however, was when people should have been in the dining room based on our experience, and it was dinner when they should have sought other food. Princess plays games with the pizza parlor, though. It’s free, but if you want it in your room you have to pay a delivery charge.

This was one of the things that aggravated me most about the cruise. There were so many rules that seemed to be focused on preserving a profit center for Princess. In addition to the pizza, breakfast in the room was restricted to continental only. At dinner, it was only the limited sandwiches on the room service menu, not the items in the dining room. Our last night, we wanted to take the strudel back to our room (Barbara saw them making it earlier that day) but the waiter was concerned that the staff might not let us take it out. We did take it out, and would have run over anyone who told us not to.

Another fiction is “formal night”. At our table, that meant maybe a suit, but more likely a sport coat, tie, and dark pants. It worked for me, and for everyone else. Don’t bother renting the tux.


Onboard activities sucked. On the last cruise, we struggled to decide what to do because there was so many options. On this cruise, we struggled to decide what to do because we had so few options, and there is only so much time you can spend in the casino or bar.


For the shows, the ventriloquist was pretty good, but the other shows were crummy. The other comedian on board was seen having drinks in Cabo and delivered a pretty crappy show afterward.

Anyway, my overall impression was that the Dawn Princess kinda sucked. It wasn’t bad, but it should have been a lot better. I had been told by other experienced cruisers that, for them, the ship was their destination, and the ports were just extra. I would have been bored to death if that were the case. Fortunately, we had some great port experiences which I’ll describe in the next posts.