Fairbanks Princess Riverside Lodge — Hotel in Alaska

Stayed as part of a princess land tour. The other alaska princess properties were great (McKinley Wilderness Lodge and Denali Wilderness Lodge), this place is an absolute joke and disgrace of the Princess brand.

Edgewater Restaurant- Food was not edible, like we actually couldn’t choke it down. Ended up paying $40 a person without taking more than a couple bites per person in hopes of finding something on our plate that we could consume. The website states there is both a buffet and regular menu, this wasn’t the case, only a buffet was available. The restaurant was heavily over staffed, but everyone was standing around on their phones or playing games with serving trays. The buffet serve-ware was crusty and covered with old caked on food. The food itself looked like leftovers that had been sitting out in the sun for several days, many items were dangerously lukewarm likely to give you food poisoning. Even the soda was flat. We ended up ordering a pizza from DoorDash and sat in the outdoor patio instead. Highly recommend grabbing an Uber and eating offsite if you are stuck at this property for a land tour.

Luggage Service - part of the benefit of staying with princess is they transport your luggage for you, this was great at their other properties. When we arrived to our hotel room our luggage was in our room, but the door to our room was left open completely unsecured. Luckily nothing was missing.

Housekeeping - After a night of nearly no sleep due to the paper thin walls and constant slamming doors, we were awoken by housekeeping with loud persistent knocking, after telling them we were still sleeping they persisted to ask when we were checking out. Mind you, princess has our flight information and is providing transportation to the airport, so you’d think they could communicate and figure this out. I’ve never experienced this at any other hotel, and typically hotels don’t have your travel plan information to begin with.

Covid precautions - the other princess properties were great with their Covid precautions, no surprise, this property was not. Most employees were not wearing masks (60%), other who had them were wearing them around their chins (30%). We never saw anyone cleaning high touch surfaces or sanitizing tables and chairs, even though this was very common to see consistently happening at the other properties.

Needless to say we won’t be staying here in the future and won’t be doing any Princess land tours after this experience. Princess should be ashamed to have their brand represented on this property and at the very least needs to make changes to the management of this property or just shut it down...

Princess totally takes advantage of its cruise passengers at this hotel. Guests have little option but to use hotel dining facilities as it is very far away from main road options. There is a $5 per person surcharge for a shuttle to downtown Fairbanks! At best it is an very overpriced 3 star facility. Rooms are functional and nicely appointed but not any better than the nearby Best Western or Pikes Landing. The staff is friendly and aims to please. However, although I understand that Alaska is expensive, i believe Princess has taken it to the lunatic fringe. Prices for food and drink higher than midtown Manhattan or Chicago. Breakfast ranges between $15 and $20 before ordering tea or coffee at $3.99 a cup. They provide free coffee (but not tea) in the room without benefit of non dairy creamers. Guests better be experienced travelers to survive land tour process. Five guests missed their buses because , in spite of their written instructions, no announcement is made in lobby. Outside it is mass confusion with literally hundreds of guests milling about trying to figure where and which bus is theirs. Very poor organization with no guest relations person available to assist with general questions. Every person left to fend for themselves . Same lack of organization at airport picking up guests at airport for transfer to hotel. Keep in mind that most guests have been traveling for more than 10 hours on average and most flights arrive very late at night Thankfully I opted out of the overpriced Princess hotel fee to arrive a day early and was able to stroll out with my baggage to waiting taxi (hotel funded) to nearby hotel that was a solid 3 star hotel with free breakfast and free return transportation to pick up Celebrity airport transportation. As it turned out the hotel delivered me directly to the Princess hotel on their shuttle rather than to airport which was about 2 miles further as a courtesy as it was 7am and they were not too busy. Could not imagine the horror of living thru the Princess hotel check in the night before after midnight with hundreds of other guests waiting on line to get their room keys. Heard some very ugly stories from fellow guests. To add insult to injury their land your bus driver/your guide is not trained to instruct guests to keep seats that they are in at every stop! This led to the guests to race and scramble for preferred seating over and over at every stop! A terrible experience. Good luck Princess...

As far as positives, the hotel staff is very nice and courteous (with only a few exceptions). That is really the only positive.

The whole management team needs to go be retrained or replaced. You would think that a place that is affiliated with a Cruise company would be well versed in processing a large number of people but you would be wrong. I arrived with a tour group of approximately 40 people at 9pm. Some of the rooms were not ready, and none of they keycards were ready. Their process for encoding the keycards somehow involved sending a runner to touch one of the keycards to the physical room door, then running it back to get the other keys made. Most of the people in my group were exhausted from traveling all day and were not happy with having to wait for one night manager and one runner to slowly encode all their cards. We were advised by our Tour Director to grab a bite to eat at the Bar and come back after.

After returning to the front desk, my keys still weren't ready. The trainee helping us (her first season) had to ask the night manager to make the key. She asked the runner to go touch my door with the one true keycard, etc, etc. As I was waiting another employee came back with a visibly upset group of travelers. They were attempting to access a room that already had someone in it. The manager was very flummoxed and completely changed gears to help them. Meanwhile the runner returned with the one true key but was ignored by the manager while she was trying to figure out why there were already people in this other room. This went on for about 5 minutes with the other group getting more and more frustrated to the point where they told her "JUST GIVE US AN EMPTY ROOM" (not a shout, but much louder than normal conversation and filled with frustration). The manager of course did not know which rooms were empty and gave a few room numbers to the runner and as she asked him to go "check and let me know which ones are empty" (it was about 10:30pm at this point). At this point the runner reminded her that I was still waiting for room keys. She had completely forgotten about me even though I was standing in front of her at the desk the entire time. I got my keys and went to my dirty and...