Princess Cruise Line

Princess' mostly mega fleet offers a quality, mainstream cruise experience. Its newest ships are stylish, floating resorts with just the right combination of fun, glamour, and gentility for a pleasant and relaxing cruise.

If you were to put Carnival, Royal Caribbean, Celebrity, and Holland America in a big bowl and mix them all together, you'd come up with the Princess' megaships. The Grand-class and Sun-class ships are less glitzy and frenzied than Carnival and Royal Caribbean; not quite as cutting-edge or witty as Celebrity's Millennium- and Century-class ships; and more youthful and entertaining than Holland America's near-megas, appealing to a wide cross section of cruisers by offering lots of activities and touches of big-ship glamour, along with lots of private balconies and plenty of the quiet nooks and calm spaces of smaller, more intimate-size vessels. You'll see: The ships feel smaller than they really are. Aboard Princess you get a lot of bang (and choices) for your buck, attractively packaged, well executed, and now a little bit looser since the line introduced "Personal Choice Dining," in which some dining rooms offer open restaurant-style seating between 5:30pm and midnight, while others stick to traditional early and late seatings.

Balconies. Nearly half of all the cabins on the Ocean, Sea, Sun, and Dawn have private balconies; on the Grand and Golden Princess, over half do.

Lots of dining choices. The Sun-class and Grand-class ships have two or three main dining rooms, one or two intimate alternative restaurants, and 24-hour buffets.

No free ice cream. It may sound petty, but it's irritating that Princess sells only Häagen-Dazs ice cream--at a couple of bucks a scoop--in lieu of the free self-service frozen yogurt and soft ice cream most other lines offer. (Princess serves the free stuff only in the dining rooms at mealtime.)

Decor lacks pizzazz. The ships are pleasant for sure, but the sea of beige and blue is so safe that it's a bit of a yawner in the design department--especially compared, for instance, to the artwork and colors on the Celebrity ships and the newer Holland America vessels.