Silhouette Losing her Identity

Overall we had a great cruise, chosen mainly for the Itinerary. The ports of call were wonderful and jewels of the Adriatic. The weather helped too, as the previous fortnight had been poor. During our cruise the sea was really calm and you couldn’t tell you were moving or at sea.

Embarkation in Venice was smooth as was dis-embarkation Civitavecchia.

The Ship itself is well appointed, and although we only had an Inside cabin it was fine. Our cabin Steward Danny was friendly and always spoke in the corridors, as did the other Stewards. I asked Danny if it was possible to have Tea & Coffee facilities in the cabin and he said he would ask his supervisor (not sure if he didn’t know or that was to put us off bothering) but sure enough a little while later a kettle arrived.

Staff generally were very friendly and helpful, bar service generally good, you rarely had to wait to grab their attention. Bar prices were reasonable for a 5* establishment. Given we only had one sea day we opted not to purchase a drinks package, although we do like a few drinks, to break even you would need to drink quite heavily in my opinion.

The entertainment on board was good, but the layout of the ship doesnƒ??t really blend itself to some of the acts/activities with too much background noise spoiling the affect. The house band and Soulstiss were good but the volume and acoustics didn’t do them justice, when they performed in a lounge they came across much better. The trivia quizzes were a bit lame with the DJ comparing a couple we attended, he seemed as though he just wanted to get it over with. The professional acts were varied, Classical Singers, accomplished pianist, Violinist, Ventriloquist ƒ?? the usual cruise acts. Not sure the acts always deserved the almost unanimous standing ovations, which I’m sure only occurs due to the herding instinct.

Having been on the Solstice previously we were expecting the food to be great, however this time food in the MDR, although fine, it lacked the WOW factor. The menu was more limited than we had remembered, the left hand side had the usual staples, chicken, steak etc, but the right hand side often had very similar dishes and throughout the 11 days several dishes were repeated with slight variations – Duck and Veal/Steak were regulars! Presentation was lacking too, hardly any veggies and appearance no better than pub grub. Desserts were below par too- on the last night there was ƒ??Flamb??ed Crepesƒ? they’d obviously been cooked for a while and kept tepid you needed a steak knife to cut them. Clearly the Chef had too many apples, Apple Pie al a mode and Apple Crumble al a mode were regulars, one night I chose Apple Cobbler – yes it was Apple Crumble. I think the MDR food standard has declined so that Celebrity can up sell their (too) many Speciality restaurants. In many locations on the ship you have staff trying to persuade to use these ƒ??at a supplementƒ? restaurants. Clearly they are not succeeding even with 50% discounts! We even received calls to the cabin trying to sell us a table at one of them. Breakfast in the MDR had plenty of choice and service was good – not sure you need whole Baked Apples for breakfast though! Again due to not really being on board much during the days we made little use of the Ocean View Buffet but when we did go in there seemed to be plenty of choice ƒ?? in fact I heard several people say they preferred it to the MDR. I do like hot desserts so when I saw ƒ??spotted puddingƒ? I opened the lid to find a plain sponge- no fruit! – this happened on several occasions.

The Ship wasn’t quite full and never seemed over crowded, Celebrity seem to waste space on facilities no one uses – for the whole 11 days we hardly saw a soul using the Lawn Club which takes up quite a bit of the upper deck. To use it you need to pay a supplement- but surely just like the speciality restaurants it can’t be paying its way.

The ship is beautiful, but it’s identity is confused, too much space is given over to high end shops, which hardly anyone visits, yet they have touts pushing ƒ??Specials/prize draw eventsƒ? leaflets into your hand and posting junk invites to your cabin. By contrast to the high end shops there are $10/$20 junk sales.

Yes we would go with Celebrity again providing the itinerary suited, but they do need to sort out their target market, and to stop the Nickel and Dime approach of up selling at the detriment of the main facilities.