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 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 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.
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.
Well, not quite.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It didn’t.
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 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.
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.
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.
