My wife and I travel quite a lot and usually stay in 4-5 star hotels to make our vacations special. We are willing to pay extra for a better view or club level service. With that said we selected the Celebrity Silhouette due to the raves about what a beautiful design the Solstice ships were. We selected the particular cruise so we could spend time in Venice and visit Kotor. I had been to Venice and wanted to take my wife there for our anniversary. We selected a stateroom with a terrace for the view and openness of the room. Reading Cruise Critic reviews we learned the best area of the ship for a quiet stateroom. It was very helpful.
We live in Asia and took SwissAir to Zurich and then down to Venice. In order to spend more time in Venice we arrived 4 days early and had a great time seeing the city. On May 16 we made our way to the maritime station to board the Silhouette. The line was long outside the building and it took maybe an hour to actually get checked in. We printed everything out on computer at home and were well prepared. Had we not prepared at home I am sure it would have taken us quite a bit longer. The lines are segregated based on your cabin class, so the more you spend on your cabin the faster your check-in I would guess. That seems fair to me, for the extra you pay for a higher class you should get better service. At the time we were a little miffed about how slow check-in was but when you think that 3,000 people are checking in I think one must understand it is not an easy task. I think they said you could check-in and board the ship from 11am -3pm. So what happens if everyone thinks 11am is a good time to check-in? I think things could go smoother if they issued multiple check-in times so the 3,000 people were separated into groups that were spread out over the 11-3 time period.
Once on board we found our stateroom 8277 and found it to be a delightful room. After looking over the room and leaving our carry-ons in the room we set out to explore the ship. WOW... what a beautiful ship the Silhouette is. It is well taken care of and very clean. I know it is a pretty new ship, but after hosting cruises for 2+ years you would expect a few issues here and there. We did not see anything that appeared to be needing repairs or needed cleaning.
Our room - 8277 was a great location near the elevators and stairs. When the door was closed you did not hear the music from the central area of the ship. We did hear neighbors closing cabinets too hard in their rooms a little but this was mostly when packing and un-packing. Overall the room was pretty quiet.