This was our 28 cruise and our first Celebrity experience. I must say that this will be our last Celebrity experience too.
We began our trip of a lifetime with four full days in Istanbul enjoyed a pre-arranged private tour experience that was outstanding, staying at the Pera Palace which I strongly recommend. The hotel's history, being the hotel for the guests traveling on the original Orient Express, and their outstanding service made the start of our vacation a Wow experience. Unfortunately, our Wow experience ended when we began our experiences with Celebrity Cruises.
As per our travel documents from Celebrity we arrived at the cruise terminal a few minutes before 12:00 noon on the morning of October 7th. A long line outside the cruise terminal surprised us. Then a few minutes on a line that did not more, a representative of Celebrity stated that they flew in earlier that morning from London to assist the Constellation staff as the dreaded virus had effected about 100 people on the previous cruise and the entire Constellation was being decontaminated before we could board the ship. There were at least 4 staff members from the London office telling everyone on line that we can not board until at least 3:00 p.m. We were told we could wait in the terminal but there was only one bathroom and limited seating. They suggested we go back into town and return later in the day. With Istanbul traffic it can take an hour just to get back into town. We opted to stay along with everyone else. These London Celebrity reps all stated that Celebrity tried to contact all guests to inform them of this problem and the delay. This was a blatant lie. I had my laptop with me and my cell phone with international access. I never got any emails or phone calls. Neither did our travel agent or any other guests after they checked while we were on-board. As we had late checkout at the hotel, we could have stayed at our hotel instead of sitting in a warehouse building with only one toilet for 3 1/2 hrs. OK, so Celebrity can not control people getting sick. So we were willing to let this pass even thought they lied about the contact info.