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Old Apr 18, 2022, 2:04 pm
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Princess is back to self-serve buffet

We were very disappointed when the buffet on our cruise last week went back to self-serve without any prior notice. Princess has basically given up on any semblance of health protocols.
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Old Apr 18, 2022, 4:29 pm
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mahasamatman,
Which Princess cruise ship of your cruise last week?
Thanks!
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Old Apr 18, 2022, 7:33 pm
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UGH

Originally Posted by mahasamatman
We were very disappointed when the buffet on our cruise last week went back to self-serve without any prior notice. Princess has basically given up on any semblance of health protocols.
Ugh--that is unfortunate.
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Old Apr 18, 2022, 7:51 pm
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Contact transfer of Covid seems to have gone by the wayside. From my clinical side I have to agree that the viral load transfer from relatively simple contact is really not significant. Of course other viruses like Norovirus are still a concern but not connected to Covid.
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Last edited by Randyk47; Apr 19, 2022 at 5:37 am
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Old Apr 19, 2022, 10:54 am
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For me

Originally Posted by Randyk47
Contact transfer of Covid seems to have gone by the wayside. From my clinical side I have to agree that the viral load transfer from relatively simple contact is really not significant. Of course other viruses like Norovirus are still a concern but not connected to Covid.
I know you are correct. However, I was hoping that one lasting effect of the pandemic would be no more self-service buffets just because they seem gross to me. Pre-Covid, I would see far too many guests grab a roll or whatever and then put it back. Yuck! Fortunately, there are many other dining options on a cruise so I rarely, if ever, go to the buffet.
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Old Apr 19, 2022, 6:15 pm
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Originally Posted by HSBC
Which Princess cruise ship of your cruise last week?
Discovery.

Originally Posted by gretchendz
I was hoping that one lasting effect of the pandemic would be no more self-service buffets just because they seem gross to me. Pre-Covid, I would see far too many guests grab a roll or whatever and then put it back. Yuck! Fortunately, there are many other dining options on a cruise so I rarely, if ever, go to the buffet.
Exactly. Eliminating self-serve was a great side effect of COVID protocols, and I had to go back to using a paper towel to handle utensils or just grabbing food directly without using utensils just for sanitary reasons. It would be nice if the dining rooms were open on port days.
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Old Apr 21, 2022, 8:46 am
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Originally Posted by mahasamatman
We were very disappointed when the buffet on our cruise last week went back to self-serve without any prior notice. Princess has basically given up on any semblance of health protocols.
This is nothing new for Princess. We took a Baltic cruise on the Emerald Princess in 2011, during the tail end of the SARS (?) epidemic. The crew got off to a good start by having every buffet station manned, but on about the third day, it was back to self-serv, and to many passengers this meant sampling the buffet items with their hands.

I returned home suffering from two communicable conditions. Never again will we cruise with Princess!
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Old Apr 21, 2022, 4:14 pm
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Originally Posted by SCEflyer
I returned home suffering from two communicable conditions. Never again will we cruise with Princess!
Just. This deserved a response. One communicable disease would be bad enough. Were both sanitation related? Or from other passengers who wandered about coughing & sneezing on people and ship density as all mass market lines have this challenge (predates Covid).
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Old Apr 21, 2022, 5:54 pm
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We’ve been cruising since 1993 and luckily have dodged the dreaded Norovirus but one or both of us has gotten some kind of flu or head cold on quite a few cruises. Of course it doesn’t help we have to fly to each and every cruise so add that to the mix. I am a doctor so we go prepared and other than maybe a day or two down days we have done well.
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Old Apr 21, 2022, 6:49 pm
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Originally Posted by SCEflyer
This is nothing new for Princess. We took a Baltic cruise on the Emerald Princess in 2011, during the tail end of the SARS (?) epidemic. The crew got off to a good start by having every buffet station manned, but on about the third day, it was back to self-serv, and to many passengers this meant sampling the buffet items with their hands.
!
Isn't this "standard", recent (dating to a few years before the advent of COVID) Carnival Corp. protocol to "eliminate" the risk of noro? 1st 48 hrs after start of a new cruise, staff dish out food in the buffet, then after that (assuming no outbreak) it reverts to self-serve. Certainly done on Holland America.
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