Royal Princess - Alaska Inside Passage from Seattle

Geography and law set the order of the calls. Out of Seattle the first full day is spent running north, and posters who have sailed from both ports keep making the same point: the Seattle track goes out through the Strait of Juan de Fuca and open water west of Vancouver Island, not the narrow Canadian Inside Passage the Vancouver departures get, so the scenery on day two is thinner than the name of the itinerary suggests. Juneau and Skagway then come back to back, Glacier Bay fills the fifth day with no landing anywhere, Ketchikan is the last Alaska stop, and the long run south ends with the late-evening Victoria call that a foreign-flagged ship has to make on a round trip from a U.S. port. Glacier Bay is what separates this loop from the other Princess sailings out of Seattle in the catalog: Discovery Princess and Star Princess both cost more, and neither enters the park.

First-hand reports of Royal Princess on this loop split by year. Posters in 2022 and 2023 were happy with it as an Alaska platform, singling out the wildlife experts Princess brings aboard and the ranger-narrated Glacier Bay day, and on a 2026 thread one reply put the average age on Princess at least twenty years below Holland America's while a travel agent on the same thread said Holland skews old. The most-upvoted first-hand review, from June 2025, is the counterweight: that couple did not regret Alaska but wished they had chosen another line, mainly because Crown Grill was booked out months ahead even with the Premier package, and a reply from a couple who did the same sailing in 2024 said they were told the ship was running about seventy percent staffed at full guest capacity. The same thread describes the Skagway water shuttle that replaced the usual walk off the pier after a 2025 landslide: shuttle tickets from the photo gallery early in the day, a small boat with limited seats, and a gangway queue worth joining early if an excursion is booked. A May 2025 review of a short Royal Princess sailing out of Seattle added an Alaska-specific caveat: the open upper decks sat empty in the cold and the outdoor pizza and burger counters went unused, so the crowd concentrated indoors.

Against the rivals, the case for this sailing is price and port mix together. Norwegian Encore and Norwegian Bliss run the same six calls from Seattle for a few hundred dollars more per person, and posters in 2024, 2025 and 2026 keep flagging the same drawback: Norwegian's Ketchikan berth is a shuttle ride from town and its port times run short. Eurodam does Glacier Bay at a higher fare but swaps Skagway for Sitka and, by every account in the threads, skews older. Norwegian Joy's nine-night loop is the cheaper way to see Glacier Bay in the catalog, but it too drops Skagway. That leaves Royal Princess as the least expensive Seattle sailing in the catalog that pairs Glacier Bay with Skagway, which is the combination several threads say a first Alaska trip should have. It is the wrong pick for anyone who wants the Canadian Inside Passage scenery or longer port days, both of which the threads consistently assign to the Vancouver departures, and for anyone choosing a ship for what happens on board rather than outside it.