Every time I go to the Cruise Critic homepage, I am amazed to see how highly rated this ship is by the members. Today, I decided to go to the individual member reviews because we had quite a disappointing experience on this ship in 2000. I've been curious to see how things could have improved that much to give this ship such a good rating. I don't know how the ratings on Cruise Critic are arrived at, as it appears from the actual member reviews that many of the things that bothered us, are still unimproved in 2004.

Our cruise began in Istanbul, and ended in Athens, and the itinerary was exquisite so certainly nothing to complain about in that category. Yes, as one member noted, there seemed to be big discrepancies in how much people paid for this cruise so one should strike a very good bargain when purchasing their tickets.

It started off rather badly, when other cruise lines had people waiting in the lobby of the hotel to check people in. Windstar did not. We were never contacted by the cruise line and received a call at 8 am the next morning asking why we had not placed our luggage in the hallway the night before. We were still asleep and had absolutely no idea we were to do that. No one had contacted us at all. We hastily packed and went down to the lobby, where we sat in a group that waited a long time for our bus to arrive to take us to the dock. At the dock, we had to ask where to go. No one from the cruise line there to direct us. Read more