Celebrity Reflection Review
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This pre inaugral cruise on Reflection was a competition prize offered by Celebrity and won through Cruise Critic. We were extremely excited to be one of the first to be sailing on this brand new ship and accepted that the format would be short and maybe all the features would not be up and running - how wrong we were with regard to the latter.
This two day cruise was primarily an advertising event for the world's press and travel agents. Although there were ships tours and lots of filming for both sectors this was not intrusive and did not spoil our enjoyment... in fact because of this there were many sections of the ship, eg suites, all categories of stateroom and parts of the spa and gym which the mere mortal would not normallly see were thrown open to us.
Travel and embarkation: Celebrity flew us from Heathrow to Amsterdam where we joined people from all corners of the world and all boarded coaches bound for Eemshaven, a tiny industrial port about 3.5 hours from Amsterdam where we would first set eyes on this beautiful ship and step aboard. Amsterdam airport was chaotic and the Celebrity staff were not easy to find but eventually we joined the rugby scrum and pushed our way onto one of the many coaches provided. Celebrity had provided everyone with a bag full of sandwiches and other goodies to get us through the journey, well done celebrity such a good touch. We stopped about 50 minutes away from the port to have a comfort break, free tea and coffee and to stretch our legs. This is the first time we realised not everything was going quite to plan, the coaches were being held at this point for longer than scheduled as the embarkation process at Eeemshaven was proving more difficult then anticipated. We continued about about half an hour late and once we got to the port were held outside for a further 20 minutes or so. Once we got into the check in marquee it took about 45 minutes to get through and actually onto the ship. We were weary when we got on board but did we think it was worth it? You bet! If we had paid for the cruise we may have felt a bit grumpy, but this was free and I am sure Celebrity learnt a few lessons when it comes to trying to get a couple of thousand multi-national people through a small tent at the same time and using just one onboard X-ray machine.