Overall: This was a wonderful cruise on a beautiful ship with excellent service.

Background: We are 73 and 59. We've sailed on Celebrity once before, on Royal Caribbean enough to be Diamond (which qualified us for Elite on Celebrity), Princess and Crystal.

Embarkation: We arrived at the ship at 12:35, after a 30 minute drive from home. There were no lines; we checked in and were upstairs in 10 minutes. Boarding was delayed first because of an immigrations problem and then because the photo id machines were not working. There were plenty of seats there, but there must have been 2000 people waiting. Finally they started boarding, suite passengers first. It was chaos, partly because over half the passengers had priority boarding - suite, aqua class, concierge class and Elite. The good news was that our cabins were ready as soon as we boarded. After dropping off our carry ons, we avoided the Oceanview Cafe mobs, and went up to the Aqua Spa Cafe for lunch. It was quiet and they had an excellent selection every day for lunch. Read more