I don’t normally highlight the preparation needed for a cruise because, frankly, very little preparation is generally needed. Pay the fare, provide the documents, get on board. Simple. With PCL2 it wasn’t quite so simple. Why? Two things: COVID and the Medallion app.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I don’t have to explain COVID to you, I hope. But Princess had a requirement that all adult passengers be fully vaccinated (check – 2 doses and a booster) AND produce a negative COVID test taken no more than 48 hours prior to embarkation. Normal COVID tests – the PCR tests – normally take 24 to 48 hours to produce a result. That would be cutting it very close, which for me was a recipe for high stress. So my strategy was to schedule 2<\/strong> tests on Thursday, 2 days before embarkation: a PCR test and a rapid response (antigen) test. That way I would be sure of getting a result within the 48 hours and if the antigen test – which is less reliable – produced a false positive, I would have the (presumably negative) PCR test as a backup.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So I first scheduled the PCR test at CVS to be done at 2:30pm on Thursday. No problem. Then I tried to schedule an antigen test at CVS to immediately follow. Nope. CVS would not let me schedule two COVID tests on the same day. So I went to the Walgreens website and successfully scheduled an antigen test for 3:15pm Thursday. Problem solved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Well, not quite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I got the PCR test at CVS without a problem, then drove to Walgreens, arriving at 3:05pm. But there was a sign on the pharmacy drive-thru window: “Pharmacy closed.” Huh? Walgreens pharmacy closed? WTF?<\/p>\n\n\n\n I went inside for an explanation. No pharmacist on duty. And they can’t legally open the pharmacy without a certified pharmacist. I pleaded, to no avail. They suggested, not very helpfully, that another Walgreens might be able to give me the test. But all tests are scheduled online and the earliest I could schedule another Walgreens test was Friday morning at 11am. I scheduled it, but was very uncomfortable cutting it that close (I was schedule to drop Rusty off at 2pm). So what was my Plan B?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Well, I remembered seeing a trailer at the Edison Mall that claimed to provide “walk-in COVID testing.” So I drove to the mall and parked at the crappy little trailer where these tests were purported to be given. I went to the door, which was locked, and read the sign on the door: “Stay in your vehicle. Someone will be with you shortly.” But the trailer looked deserted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I did indeed return to my car, but with no real hope of seeing anyone. As I was mulling over Plan C, the door opened and a woman in a lab coat came out. She took my driver’s license and had me fill out a trivial form (name, DOB, phone number, email) and then swabbed my nose twice (because they did both PCR and antigen tests) and told me to wait 10 minutes. By 3:45pm I had my antigen test result: negative. They promised to send the formal notice of the result to me via email. I waited on pins and needles until the result arrived, which didn’t happen until about 6pm. I then breathed a sigh of relief and canceled my Friday Walgreen’s appointment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The second (trailer) PCR test result arrived Friday night: also negative. I still haven’t received the first CVS test result, which would have been a disaster, if I had relied on that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Princess, not surprisingly, had a rapid result test booth set up at the cruise terminal, for people who couldn’t get a test prior to check-in. I guess that would have been Plan C.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now the other “adventure”: the Princess Medallion app. This is a smartphone app that provides all kinds of useful information while onboard: deck maps, dinner menus, events, etc. But it also is used to provide Princess with some critical information needed for checkin (e.g., passport information). I thought it was unwise for Princess to rely on a sophisticated smartphone app when many of their passengers were too old to be technologically savvy. But in my case it all would have been fine if the app had worked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It didn’t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Case in point: the passport information. The preferred method of providing this information was to use the phone to scan the ID page of the passport. That feature didn’t work. The backup mechanism – manual entry – worked, but just barely. Entering the passport number was simple. Entering the expiration date required scrolling through pop-up monthly calendars until I got to 2028. A PITA. Entering my DOB had the same problem – I had to scroll through more than 1,000<\/strong> months to get to 1949. Took me 10 minutes and gave my index finger a cramp. Stupid, stupid user interface. Idiotic, really. When I next spoke to Princess (which I did 3 times in total, for a total phone wait time of over 2 hours) I gave them a piece of my mind. “Worst app EVER” was my candid assessment. They admitted that the app had a lot of problems. To say the least.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another case in point: I found 3 places in princess.com and the Medallion app where my gender was recorded. The values in those 3 locations: “male”, “female” and “undisclosed”. Humorous, I suppose. Maybe I will laugh someday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The bottom line was that I jumped through the hoops that I needed to jump through to get on board, but it wasn’t easy. And it certainly wasn’t fun.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I don’t normally highlight the preparation needed for a cruise because, frankly, very little preparation is generally needed. Pay the fare, provide the documents, get on board. Simple. With PCL2 it wasn’t quite so simple. Why? Two things: COVID and the Medallion app. I don’t have to explain COVID to you, I hope. But Princess … Continue reading