I am taking some time off and have turned the Blog over to my colleagues Bob and Nancy Dunn of Cruising Done Right. They are currently on an Alaska tour and cruise with Princess Cruises. Today’s blog is about the lodges that make Princess the industry leader in Alaska.
ALASKA — On our first day in Alaska, Princess Cruise Lines Vice-President of Public Affairs Bruce Bustamante was talking about the stringent environmental procedures that apply in the waters of Alaska.
“We’re very conscious of the footprint we leave, and minimizing it,” he says.
Well, there is a Princess footprint in Alaska — not the environmental one — that is huge. There are Princess ships, of course, that stop primarily at Whittier, Skagway, Juneau and Ketchikan, but that’s just the beginning of the Princess impact.
There are Princess buses, trains and lodges. It is the only cruise line with business interests that go so deep into the wilderness and, as a result, the largest tour operator in the entire state is, you guessed it, Princess. Last year, over 200,000 visitors poured off (or onto) Princess ships in Alaska, a figure that exceeds the population of every city in the state but Anchorage.
That’s not to say Princess dominates the cruise line landscape in Alaska, although maybe it does. What Princess does do is offer the Alaska cruiser an all-inclusive vacation, a one-stop shop, and it can do that because of 
the lodges. Other cruise lines have buses and even rail cars — Princess has its own train to take passengers on a 9-hour trip from the interior to the cruise terminal — but none of them can match the wilderness lodges.
There are five of them now, and the lodge population has grown over 24 years, starting with the one at Denali (above), built in 1987 and still the biggest with 656 rooms. Of the five, we stayed at three that were the same but different. If that doesn’t make any sense…they are all on rivers, they have the same architectural feel, the same customer service philosophies and with few exceptions the same menus. They are also different, in more than name.
The Kenai Princess Wilderness Lodge was our first stop. With 86 rooms (that have wood-burning fireplaces), it is one room bigger than the smallest lodge, at Copper River. It sits high above another river, the Kenai, in the heart of the peninsula where many Alaskans spend their 
summer vacations. There’s no doubt you’re in the wilderness — bear encounters are possible — and there’s a coziness to it than the others don’t have. Once a church camp, it still has an area that can accommodate up to 40 RVs. Of the three, it’s closest to the cruise terminal at Whittier and closest to the big city, Anchorage, an hour or so from each.
The Mount McKinley Lodge is the only hotel inside the boundaries of Denali State Park and, on a clear day, it offers a spectacular view of the mountain it is named after and closest to, just 41 miles, roof to peak. On a less-than-clear day, the lodge offers a cloud-enhanced view that still sends visitors rushing for the camera (see photo), which is inevitably
aimed through the arch that gives Princess an incalculable advertising impact (see photo again). It was a family homestead until Princess came along in 1997 and enlarged it into a 460-room hotel complex on 146 acres beside the Chulitna River. It has a restaurant called 20320, which is not a zip code but the height of the mountain…however, the chocolate mousse (or moose?) that’s not to be missed is in the main dining room.
The view of “The Mountain” can be almost as spectacular from the Denali Lodge, on a complex so large that Princess shuttles run every 10 minutes to pick up guests at their rooms. Of the three lodges we visited, this one has just about everything, including its own little village with shops, a spa and four restaurants. Overlooking the Nenana River, it’s a mile from the entrance to Denali National Park, with six million acres of fauna and 
flora, taiga and tundra, and wildlife that has plenty of opportunity to avoid the 92-mile Park Highway, and often does. All the exotic tours, like flightseeing and river rafting, are short drives away and across the road there’s what you could call a souvenir strip mall for the bargain hunters.
The lodges are a testament to the Princess commitment to Alaska. The investment has been tens of millions of dollars, a big bite for facilities that are open no more than five months every year, with the exception of the “hotel” in Fairbanks. It’s mainly because of its lodges that Princess employs 3,300 people, all but 700 of them seasonally. We met bus drivers from Jacksonville and Walla Walla (Washington), railway workers from North Carolina and Niagara Falls, hotel workers from Georgia and Salt Lake City and tour guides from Oregon and Tennessee. They all come for the season, and go home for the winter.
Ask them and you’ll find, like so many Princess passengers, that they come back for more the following year.
“My husband and I went on a two-week cruise, I loved it here and I applied online,” said Beverly Porter, the bus driver from Florida. “I have three meals a day and I haven’t cooked or washed dishes since May.”
For more on our Alaska adventure, click here.
