Ruby Princess - Hawaiian Islands from San Francisco

Nine of the sixteen nights are at sea, and that ratio is the whole decision. The outbound run is four straight sea days from San Francisco before Kauai, then the four islands come one per day, Kauai, Honolulu, Kona and Maui, with Honolulu the long one at an eleven-in-the-evening departure and Kona the fragile one, since it is a tender call that gets cut short or dropped when the swell is up. Then five more sea days back toward the mainland, a stop at Ensenada that exists only because a foreign-flagged ship sailing between American ports needs a foreign call, and a final sea day up the coast. There is no flying and no packing for a land stay, which is the point of doing this from San Francisco rather than joining the Honolulu-based inter-island loop on NCL's Pride of America that route threads keep raising as the alternative.

Posters who have done Princess's Hawaii round trips describe the sea days as the good part rather than the price of admission. A 2018 thread asking about mixed reviews of Ruby on this route drew three replies from repeat Hawaii cruisers: Princess fills the crossing with hula, lei-making and ukulele classes, lectures and live Hawaiian music, and one family said the sea days were relaxing and there was plenty of island time; a 2019 reply elsewhere called a fifteen-night Princess loop from Los Angeles the best cruise they had taken, for the same reason. The honest caveat in the 2018 thread is that each island gets roughly a twelve-hour day, a superficial visit that mostly tells you which island to fly back to. A 2025 poster torn between this sailing and a Panama Canal run worried about four and five consecutive sea days on a ship without Royal Caribbean's hardware; the replies said Princess runs enough overlapping daytime programming that afternoons feel busy, and that short of water slides the offering is the same as on a big Royal ship. The skeptics live in the route threads: a 2025 reply argued that Alaska was made for cruising and Hawaii was not, since a concrete pier, a bus to a beach and a bus back is not the island, and that the crossing means paying to be on a boat and nothing else. Both views are right about the same facts.

Ruby is the cheapest of the Princess ships doing this from California that reaches all four islands: Emerald Princess runs the same sixteen nights for several hundred dollars more per person and does not call at Kona, while Discovery Princess from Los Angeles is the budget option but shares only Honolulu and Kona with this port list. Holland America's Koningsdam and Nieuw Amsterdam cover every port here, from San Diego or in an eighteen-day circle, at close to the same fare with a night or two more at sea. Among Ruby's own San Francisco sailings this is the long one; the ten-night Alaska and Mexican Riviera loops and the seven-night California coast run all have far fewer sea days for far less money. It suits people who will not fly, like a slow ship and want a first look at four islands to decide where to return; it does not suit anyone who wants to spend real time in Hawaii, or first-time cruisers who have never sat through two sea days, let alone five. One more thing from a 2023 route thread: when the Lahaina fire closed Maui, Emerald's version of this itinerary swapped in a second Big Island day and then lost its Ensenada call to a hurricane, so on a route this long the port list is a plan, not a promise.