Crown Princess Sea Day

I’ve really tried to give our cabin steward the benefit of the doubt. After coming off a month on the Caribbean Princess where we had the best cabin steward ever, I knew it would be hard for the next steward to come close to meeting Smit’s excellence. But our cabin steward here hasn’t even come close to coming close. We are really flexible people and don’t ask a lot. Just clean our cabin well when we’re ready for it and make sure we have plenty of ice.

I’m a patient person and give people lots of chances. (If you ask my husband I give too many chances.) He might be right. Because lots of chances for this cabin steward isn’t working out so well. There are some things you come to expect on a Princess ship when it comes to your cabin.

You expect your cabin steward to:

• Introduce him/herself. (I’m still waiting for that one.)
• Greet you. (Still waiting on that, too.)
• Supply clean towels. (Ok there.)
• Wipe down counters. (Sorta-kinda happening.) You can tell he doesn’t wipe down the desktop because if he did he would have noticed these exposed wires, don’t you think? I can’t decide whether to wait and see how much longer it takes him to catch it or report it to the Passenger Services Desk.

• Replenish ice. (We didn’t even have an ice bucket for three days. How can you not realize an ice bucket is missing out of a refrigerator, especially when you (are supposed to) refill it daily? The only way we got it was because I left a note. Now that we have the ice bucket, we only are getting ice every other day. What’s up with that?)
• Replenish soap and shampoo. (Needed to leave a note on that same piece of paper I used for the ice bucket note.)
• Makes sure you have a writing utensil and pad of paper to write on. (We had one piece of paper. And used it up when I wrote the note about needing an ice bucket and soap. The paper hasn’t been replaced yet.)
• Vacuum. (Not sure that’s happening.)
• Make beds. (Sloppily, but done.)
• Knock and announce him/herself before entering. (Never. He opens the door first, knocks as he’s walking through the door, and never, ever, has announced himself. If your privacy sign isn’t out, expect him to come in anytime he is on duty.)
• Ask about dinner arrangements so he knows when best to clean the cabin. (Nope. Don’t think he really cares because he barges in whenever he is ready to clean, not when we ask for the cabin to be cleaned.)

So for only the second time in our cruising history, we will not be leaving an additional tip. If we could remove gratuities just for him, we would. But pulling gratuities mean everyone else would suffer, and we wouldn’t want that to happen.

On a more pleasant note, we did have some nice weather earlier this afternoon. Pizza by the pool. Now that’s a vacation.

Off to yet another sea day tomorrow.

Update: Today was our ice delivery day and we came back after dinner and were welcome by nothing other than a half-full bucket of ice. Guess we're in an ice shortage these days. And I also just realized we never received our elite canape ordering card for formal nights. Calling Smit on the Caribbean Princess, where are you when we need you?!