Just got off a 10 day trip on Sun Princess, the newest vessel in the fleet. Here's my honest review and takeaway.

The Ship

The ship is nice, it's clearly new, and everything is pristine. However, to be honest, I found it a bit underwhelming. Maybe it's just me but for all the boasting about this being the newest ship in the fleet, it really didn't look or feel much different than any other ship. Which isn't to say that it was "bad," it just didn't feel terribly special for being a brand new ship. Some of this might be because some of the features were not ready yet and the dome didn't have much going on either.

The Staterooms

There were 6 in our party and we had 3 different staterooms. A balcony, a premium balcony, and a min-suite. The rooms were all very nice, very new and clean (for the most part) and spacious. Can't really say anything negative about the rooms... except... they have these little motion-sensor lights on either side of the bed which is a nice touch if you need to get up in the middle of the night and go to the bathroom or something but they're a little bright and annoying and, far as I could tell, no way to turn them off. I liked it, but some in our party found them too bright/distracting.

ETA: Another thing that's really a dumb sorta nitpick but the faucets in the stateroom bathroom are short. I know that sounds weird but what I mean is that... picture a sink. Now picture the faucet except the faucet is at the top left corner of the sink instead of at the top middle. That's fine, but the faucet was short. If you wanted to wash your hands under the faucet, you'd basically splash water all over the place and/or hit your knuckles against the side of the sink while doing it (because it's in the corner and not in the middle). Like... that's a nitpicky thing and it's not a big deal or anything it's just weird lol

The Buffet

As of my cruise, the buffet was not self serve. It's more of a cafeteria style setup with pre-plated portions (for the most part) that the staff hands out to you. This is fine by me, to be honest, but some people may not like it. Overall, however, I found the buffet somewhat lacking. I was on an older Norwegian ship last year and the buffet felt easily twice the size of Sun Princess. It was more than adequate, but again- for being a brand new ship it almost felt like an afterthought.

Main Dining Room

I dined in the main dining room numerous times for dinner and lunch. Here's where the food goes off the rails a little bit. The food, overall, was fine, but the staff felt overwhelmed. Just about anything that was supposed to be hot was served lukewarm-ish. I understand serving 4,000 people at the same time isn't easy so I'm not really one to complain at the time, but pretty much nothing was hot in the 10 days and ~15 or so trips to the MDR. Maybe I should have said something but given how long service was taking I didn't want to know how long I'd have to wait for them to nuke something and bring it back to me.

The staff was also hit and miss. Again, it's a new ship and maybe some of these folks are new as well. I heard more than one staff member complain about "the new system" too so maybe that had something to do with it but overall the main dining room staff was hit and miss in terms of how good they were. It ranged from really happy, positive, upbeat servers who knew how to serve to folks who seemed like this was their first gig waiting tables and had their personality surgically removed.

Specialty and other Dining

We did one specialty restaurant (Sabatini's, the Italian place) and it was underwhelming. Not bad, just nothing really special and not worth the extra money in my opinion.

Room service used to be free, now it's not. There's a one-time $14.99 charge to order room service from your app, then there's an extremely limited selection of complimentary items available, and a slightly less limited selection of items you can pay for. Convenient, but very very very very very limited selection and some of them are kids stuff (chicken fingers, PB&J sandwich, etc.,). It's not a great sign when you struggle to find something to order from a free menu. There were a limited number of desserts available via room service which was disappointing and weird considering the International Cafe had 3x the selection and was complimentary. Additionally, same as the main dining room, everything was on the colder side which isn't unexpected with room service, it's just unfortunate when you're hoping for something like hot fries with your burger and they're lukewarm at best.

The International Cafe is a fun little place where you can always get something to eat. They always have about a dozen desserts and pastries (complimentary) and a couple different sandwiches or savory items. It's open 24/7. The only downside (ish) to this is the selection never seemed to change in 10 days. Maybe that's on purpose, but a little variety may have been nice.

Morning coffee - I don't know if everyone gets this because it didn't seem like it, but we were in a mini-suite and they gave us a door hanger each night to order coffee or a limited selection of breakfast items (ie. pastries, fruit, yogurt) for the morning. It was a nice touch to have coffee delivered to our stateroom each morning, but....

We did this every morning and every morning it was at least a little wrong. Either it came at the wrong time (too early or too late) or we got milk instead of cream or we got random things we didn't order in addition to what we did order... none of it was egregious, it was just hilarious how literally every time it was a little wrong.

Elevators

The new elevators are fantastic and a highlight of the ship (lol not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing). Instead of just pressing up or down, you select from a touchscreen which deck you're going to and the system assigned an elevator that takes you there and tells you which elevator it'll be. Really efficient and severely limited the lines/wait at elevators. It was awesome.

WiFi

WiFi at sea was fine, but too expensive for what it is. This really feels like the sort of thing cruise lines should start offering for free. It's 2024. Not 2004. There's free WiFi everywhere. At the very least, it doesn't need to be $25 a day (which is about what it was) for a single device. I get that WiFi is a service and it may be limited and they don't necessarily want 4,000 people all on it at the same time cuz it'll slow it down, but it just feels like one of those things cruise lines should start offering for free, or bundling into the cost of the cruise, or something. Or maybe, like hotels, having a free version and a paid version for higher speeds.

Casino

The casino is mostly a smoking casino. There's a small-ish section for non-smoking but it's still all in the same room and not separated at all so if you don't like smoke, you're kinda outta luck. Not a problem for me, but some may have an issue. Not a ton of table games but you expect that on a cruise ship. Slots were plentiful, though not really as varied as I would have liked. There was a lot more Buffalo games than they really needed, in my opinion. I know it's one of the more popular games these days so I get why they did it but overall they didn't have a lot of my favorites. I mean, again, more than adequate if you want to play, and that's just my personal opinion.

Slots were pretty tight, however, and the payouts were lower than the same machines at a land casino. Somewhat disappointing there. I hit a few spins and a few bonuses that would easily have been $2K-$3K hand pays on land but were like, $200 on Sun Princess. It was really weird.

ETA: I'm not unfamiliar with cruise ship casinos. I'm a casino guest on 3 different cruise lines and I never pay for a cruise, they're always free because of how much I play, so I get that the odds and payouts are different but this just felt to me like they were unusually tight and stingy with the payouts even relative to other cruise ship casinos.

Nitpicks:

1. I drink iced tea with just about every meal and it's like none of these dining rooms or waiters had ever heard of iced tea or knew how to serve it. Each time I was presented with a glass of iced tea but no lemon, no sugar, no sweetener, and no spoon to stir it with. It's nitpicky on my part, but it's just amazing to me that any restaurant would ever dream of serving anyone iced tea without automatically giving lemon, sweetener, and a spoon and/or straw to stir it. So I had to ask each time and even when I asked ahead of time I was almost always having to ask again for one of the items they didn't bring. Just wild.
2. Whatever you order to drink, that's what you get. Good luck getting a refill anywhere. No one ever offered to refill my iced tea, my date's soda, more tea or coffee, etc., It's like once you get your first glass/cup/mug, that's what you get. Just weird. Again, staff felt overwhelmed at times so maybe that's it, but it was like pulling teeth to get a refill on a beverage.
3. For a cruise line who will gladly give you 17 pieces of cake and 15 appetizers with dinner, for some reason they're extremely protective of condiments. It's just weird. This isn't exclusive to Princess, as all cruise lines seem to do this but, for example, one time for lunch we all ordered burgers and fries and they doled out ketchup by the teaspoon, one by one, to each person. And it's weird to be like "hey, guy with the tiny dish of ketchup.. give me more ketchup. I have more fries than that." Like...dude, just leave the bottle. Or, just have little ramekins of ketchup that you can leave on the table. I just don't understand why cruise lines do this. It's annoying.

Overall

I can't say too much negative about Sun Princess. It's a fine ship and it was an enjoyable cruise. Overall I felt it was a little underwhelming and some of that I think is driven by two things:

1. For a new ship, I think I expected more. Sun Princess clearly wasn't at 100% with all the feature and amenities ready to go so that may have something to do with it, but I think I expected more than what it was. It didn't really feel any "better" than any other Princess ship and in some ways I felt it wasn't as good as previous Princess Ships.
2. There was so much that was just "a little off" that it was weird. I outlined most of that above but little things like not getting sugar with iced tea, room service being wrong, food being cold, etc., most of it was "fine" but just a "little" off and when you put all that together it adds up to a lot that isn't terrible on its own, just a lot of little things that are kinda head scratchers.