It never crossed my mind that the third of March would be Spring Break for some schools! Celebrity has never been the cruise line of choice for party going young people, so I seriously thought we’d boarded the wrong ship on the wrong cruise line. Young people boarded and went straight to the bars. We never saw bar staff verify any passenger’s age. This was definitely a Spring Break Party Cruise and we'd somehow gotten our older selves into the middle of it. I kept thinking, where are we? This can't be The Connie!

The music everywhere on the ship was irritatingly loud and obviously aimed at this under 30, partygoing group of young people. That couldn't have been a mistake. The Celebrity we know must be marketing to a new, younger customer. They had a DJ from Miami and that was the 'music' that greeted us at sailaway. They might as well have handed us a bottle of beer at boarding rather than a glass of sparkling white wine. All we heard for five nights and days was the boom, boom, boom of the bass! On the pool deck, it was impossible to read once the music started. At night in the martini bar, everyone looked well over fifty and yet the DJ set up right near us. Conversation stopped because we quickly got tired of yelling to one another over the music.

Young people can be charming and some definitely were, but more than once we saw shirtless young men in their wet bathing suits at the buffet in The Oceanview Cafe. Never saw staff tell them to don a shirt and even saw one staff member, dispensing hand sanitizer at the entrance to the buffet, drop a blob of the liquid into the hand of a young man wearing no shirt without saying a word. Also irritating, apparently the young don’t understand that when you party until 2 AM, it is polite to return to your cabin quietly. We definitely picked the wrong ship at the wrong time and it will be the last time we do that. Read more