After a superb experience cruising the Mediterranean last year aboard the Celebrity Silhouette, we took our daughters on a cruise around the British Isles this summer on the Celebrity Infinity, hoping for a similar experience. Sadly, our experience aboard the Infinity did not meet our expectations.
The cruise embarked from the port of Harwich, approximately a 2-hour drive from London. We opted for the Celebrity transportation from Heathrow Airport to Harwich and we were immediately disappointed. The company providing the transportation did not make themselves easily visible, although we did locate them. We were told that our bus would be here in 60-90 minutes and we were encouraged to explore Heathrow for coffee and breakfast and told to return in an hour. Ten minutes later, after our grown daughters had gone for shopping and coffee, we were told to get on the bus. This necessitated a mad dash around the airport on my part trying to reassemble our family, made all the more unpleasant by the rudeness of the transportation company which had just precipitated the problem with their misinformation.
Perhaps the most unpleasant aspect of the cruise was the inaccurate itinerary advertised by Celebrity. All of the online material, the printed itinerary, and the dining itinerary indicated that on Day 8 (Monday August 11, 2014) and Day 9 (Tuesday August 12, 2014), the ship would be ported at Greenock, Scotland near Glasgow and about 2 hours from Edinburgh. This was very misleading. The ship arrived in port at Greenock at 7 am on 8/11/14 and departed 19 hours later at 2 am on 8/12/14. Thus, Day 9 was a day spent at sea, not in the port of Greenock. Thus, we had one day to see both Glasgow and Edinburgh, not two. I checked with multiple other passengers who had also interpreted the published schedule to mean that we had 2 days in port near Glasgow, not one. No one on the ship could explain why the itinerary did not mention that 8/12/14 was a Sea Day. We had signed up to see The Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo on the evening of 8/11/14, not realizing that taking this excursion through Celebrity precluded us from touring the city of Edinburgh, which was one of the principle goals of the trip. For some reason, Celebrity constructed the excursion to Edinburgh for the Military Tattoo in such a manner that one could not tour the city in the morning and afternoon and see the show in the evening, which I suspect most passengers would have preferred.
The cabin had reasonable space, a small couch, table, desk, small flat screen TV, and a balcony with an unobstructed view. It was fine for our purposes.