Several power outages over the past 24 hours on the Royal Princess have caused delays for the cruise ship. Cruise Fever learned about the power outages from our staff member Ben Souza, who is currently on the Royal Princess.
The ship is now expected to arrive in St Thomas on April 2 at 12:00 p.m., 4 hours later than originally scheduled. The Royal Princess will stay in St. Thomas until 8:00 p.m., to help make up for the late arrival.
The cruise ship began having power issues on March 31 when the power went out at 8:10 a.m. as the ship was in route to Princess Cays. Emergency lights came on but the ship was without propulsion and basic hotel functions (running water etc).
Power was restored to the ship within 15 minutes but the outage caused the ship to arrive later than scheduled into Princess Cays.
Tony Draper, the captain of the Royal Princess, kept passengers informed of the situation as he made announcements within 5 minutes of the power going out.
The power problems continued into the night as the ship experienced 2 more short outages at 1:15 a.m. and 6:30 a.m. on April 1. Captain Draper said that these two outages were unrelated to the first one and were caused by a generator problem.
Due to the outages, basic hotel functions and the ship’s propulsion were affected. This caused the ship to sail at a reduced speed of 15 knots.
Draper made a public address announcement that the problems have been fixed and the ship is once again sailing at full speed towards St. Thomas. He has made several timely announcements keeping the passengers informed of the problems.
The Royal Princess is currently on a 7 night cruise to the Eastern Caribbean out of Ft. Lauderdale with stops in the ports of Princess Cays, Bahamas; St. Thomas, U.S.V.I.; and Philipsburg, St. Maarten.
Cruise Fever will have all updates on the power problems with the Royal Princess and will update this page if/when more information becomes available.
As if this ship didn’t have a bad enough reputation prior to this! Let’s face it there is such a thing as too big and witnessed by the “Some other article you may like”. Every one of them is for a behemoth.