We had booked this cruise mainly on the destinations with Istanbul being our number one priority to visit. Unfortunately a couple of weeks prior to sailing the overnight stay in Istanbul was cancelled due to the ongoing troubles in the region. I was quite concerned about the cancellation as we were on a Celebrity organised fly cruise which only arrived very late on the day of sailing but was assured that this would not be a problem.

We arrived at the ship at approximately 7:30pm with around 60 other passengers but the check in and security clearance still took over two hours to complete. I'm at a loss as to why additional staff could not be available to make this process more efficient. After finally boarding and managing to get a table in the anytime dining section of the MDR we were then informed that we must attend a secondary muster drill 20 minutes later. I absolutely agree that safety is paramount but the so called muster drill was basically a box ticking exercise. Even then it was scant on genuine information and would not have helped in case of a genuine emergency.

We then headed back to our stateroom to find that they basically hadn't bothered finishing the setup. We were missing all the usual information including the daily, our Captains Club information and Cruise Critic connections information. This resulted in us missing the get together which was arranged for the morning after. Most disappointingly the waste baskets were still full of the previous guests rubbish. Read more