This year we made two cruises to the Caribbean (our first ones to this area), one with RIVIERA (Oceania) and upon return in Miami, the same day boarding CELEBRITY ECLIPSE. Oceania is in a higher category than Celebrity and that was proved by the far better food in their (free) restaurants. After a couple of days we were disappointed by the lack of variation in the food offered in the cafetaria restaurant of ECLIPSE and the average quality of the Main dining room. Quisine was nice but it is a pity that they charge you extra for their speciality restaurants, which, of course, is quite common with most cruise-operators. Oceania is a relief in that respect: all restaurants are free of charge and the food is excellent.

However, about Celebrity we have a serious complaint. When receiving the various documents from our travelagent over here in The Netherlands we had to fill in a special form about the way you wished to pay for your on-board expenses. Of course, all expenses are charged to your account in US dollars but you had to confirm whether you wanted Celebrity to charge the total to your creditcard in US dollars or that they themselves converted the amount to the currency of your creditcard (for us: euro). Since I supposed that Celebrity would use a convenient conversionrate for themselves, I chose for charging my creditcard in US dollars and consequently let VISA make the conversion.

I was very surprised to learn upon return in Holland that my creditcard was charged in euros by Celebrity and calculating the difference between the conversionrate used by them and the VISA conversionrate I found out that by doing this Celebrity "earned" US dollars 50 extra. Read more