The Princess Medallion
Hello Cruise Fans!
I hope your week is going well. As a reminder - Father's Day is Sunday so if you haven't secured a Father's Day gift for father, or your husband, I'm sure they'd love a good cruise!
This post will focus on the often hated Princess Medallion and our experience with it on our May cruise with Princess.
Based on our experience, and other posts, it appears that the Medallion experience is different for every person and on every ship. As a little background, we have a strong technology background and consider ourselves fairly tech savvy.
I think everyone would agree that the premise of what they are trying to do with the Medallion app is awesome! However, it's still got bugs and issues to be worked out in our opinion.
1. I think they bite off more than they could chew by trying to have the app do too much out of the gate. No real baby steps, testing & adding functionality - they threw it all out there together at once.
2. Testing - I'm not sure they tested the app with a full range of demographics. There is a wide range of ages and technical knowledge on every cruise, and usability of the app is paramount.
3. Feedback - Other than the survey they send after every cruise, i'm not sure how they are getting feedback to make quality updates to meet their customer needs. That's disappointing in general.
What worked well with the Medallion for us?
Check in at the port was amazingly smooth, we had both completed all the steps pre arrival and were green laned. We were thru check in with in 5 minutes, and that's a MAX time. (we did still have to wait at the Vancouver port to board, because of issues with the Vancouver port officials, not Princess)
Accessing our rooms with the Medallion was so easy, I love not having to dig for a key to get into the room.
What worked ok, but needs to be improved?
Room Service was hit or miss. If we ordered room service to our room via the app we got the room service every time. I tried once to order a pizza via the app at one of the Atrium/Promenade bars and never got it (we waited in the same spot for 1 hour) it finally showed cancelled in the app, and I was not the one who cancelled it. Another time, I ordered a drink via the app in Princess Live and it arrived without an issue.
We bought the watch holder/wearable on the ship for our medallion. It was ok - I didn't find it very comfortable. I had bought something off Amazon that would attach to my Apple watch band and hold my medallion but I forgot to take it with me on the trip! Next time I plan to try that approach.
What didn't work at all?
Seeing the daily activities/schedule via the app. Once we got on the ship neither my husband nor I could see any of the daily activities via the app. We tried ALL THE THINGS to solve it, turning off cellular, ensuring we were in airplane mode, etc.etc.... and from our conversations with others, it didn't work for any of them. I think that was the most disappointing thing to be broken. We both work while cruising and stay connected to wifi... so not being able to see what was happening on the ship from an activities standpoint was really frustrating. We had to end up carrying around a paper Patter. I'm just glad they were offering paper patters.
I know they are working to make improvements, and COVID escalated this process faster than Princess wanted to move. I know they will get the issues resolved, because i'm sure Princess employees spend a LOT of time & effort dealing with Medallion issues. I still love the idea, and think the Medallion approach is 100% the correct path to take, just needs to work to make it flow smoother.
Next post will focus on the Land Tour portion of our Alaska cruise - Lots of good stuff to talk about on that side of the tour.
Thanks again for following along, hope you all are finding this information useful.
Mrs. Cruise Navigator