Avalon Creativity Review
Avalon Creativity is the eighth and most recent new-build for fledgling Avalon Waterways. Though these eight ships are purpose-built for Avalon, they are all leased, rather than owned, by Globus, Avalon's parent company and longtime land tour heavyweight.
Creativity, brand spanking new, the foam from its summer 2009 christening Champagne barely dry on its port side flank when we cruised, is physically a masterpiece. Inside and out, the lines are clean and contemporary, though a bit stark for some. It's much like the lobby of a major Swiss bank: beautiful carpeting and marble, wood paneling and inlays, a bit short on art. Gracefully spiraling stairways and a vest-pocket elevator link the interior decks at amidship. Ample glass keeps the interior bright and airy during daylight hours.
Expedition cruising and river cruising share one aspect. Each "stalks" its prey -- whether wildlife, as in the former, or art, culture and history for the latter. In either case the “horizon” is never more than spitting distance away, so lots of viewing space is a must, and Creativity has floor-to-ceiling glass walls in 90 percent of its cabins.
Central to the concept of all these vessels is shore touring, and on Avalon Creativity, Globus' pedigree shines through. Invariably, the guides who shepherded our daily tours spoke virtually unaccented, nearly perfect English. If only we could say the same for the language skills of the majority of onboard crew and staff members. In truth, despite the elements of shore touring that Globus may have brought to the table, Avalon may still be a case of too much too soon. The major cruise lines have learned that every new launch should pull roughly half of its veteran staff, capable of teaching newcomers, from existing ships in the fleet.
This rule of thumb seemed to be ignored on Creativity. (We received a charge slip for two bottles of vodka from our mini-bar each day for five days because our cabin steward, Dimas, counted the empty slots, but he also forgot that he was supposed to fill those slots.)
Sadly, we were not alone in this observation. At about the midpoint of the voyage, I interviewed a well-traveled cruiser for his assessment of the ship. His grumpy response was that the ship was "Understaffed, undertrained and underprovisioned." I would like to believe that these glitches are due to growing pains, but I can't base a review on that leap of faith; instead, what follows is a snapshot of what was, not what someday may be.
We found the shortcomings to fall into two general categories: the "Scrooge" factor and "Which American Market You Talkin' About, Willis?"
The "Scrooge" factor refers to a regular pattern of coming up short on goods and supplies, creating an impression of either stinginess or unintentional miscalculation of provisioning needs. For example:
 On two of the first three days of the cruise, the bar totally ran out of vodka. Each day, the hotel director went ashore to re-provision. How much vodka did she bring back? Two 750 ml bottles -- for 140 passengers. There was literally an outburst from passengers arriving at the beginning of the sailing's second understocked two-for-one "Happy Hour."
Each afternoon, Creativity has a coffee and cake service, the equivalent of teatime. The first occurrence of this event featured a chocolate cake -- literally a chocolate cake, as in one. Of course the total supply of cake was depleted before the first twenty of so passengers had been served.
The normal breakfast schedule called for Early Riser Breakfast, consisting of pastries, fruit, juice and coffee in the aft lounge/library from 5:30 to 6:30 a.m., followed by the regular buffet breakfast in the restaurant, served until 8:30 a.m., followed, in turn, by a Late Riser Breakfast at 8:30 a.m. in the aft lounge. For some reason, the minute breakfast started in the restaurant, the pastries were snatched away in the aft lounge to be replaced by commercially available tinned butter cookies, which were left on display until 8:30 a.m., at which point the pastries made a reappearance. Was it so costly to leave the pastries out in the aft lounge so that those not wanting a full buffet breakfast had the option of coffee and pastries?
Each bathroom was limited to two small bath towels and two small face towels, though there was ample storage space for more.
As described in its own releases, Avalon Waterways is theoretically supposed to be tailored to the American market. And the message is getting through; we didn't encounter a single non-English-speaking passenger on our cruise. But, there are many areas of design and administration that seem to be blissfully unaware of that mission statement (thus the "Which American Market You Talkin' About, Willis?" you talking about):
Precious few crewmembers spoke English. This deficit applied mostly to dining room crew and cabin stewards. Simple requests were often met with blank stares. Attempting to achieve something slightly more complex was virtually impossible. (For example, purchasing a bottle of wine at dinner and trying to have the remaining half re-corked and marked with our cabin number for the following night's dinner was nearly unachievable.)
Avalon's Web site states, under the heading "electricity": Electricity onboard is 220v. The bathrooms have a dual 220v/110-120v plug for shavers and small appliances. First of all, why a ship designed for the American market doesn't have 120v American-style plugs, along with the European 220v outlets throughout the cabins, is a mystery, but the promised 120v bathroom outlets were nonexistent, and few passengers brought converters. Converters were also not made available by the ship.
Every cabin has a flat-screen television. We counted as many as 20 channels (depending on satellite positioning). Of the total channel complement, there were only two functional ones that were in English: BBC and CNBC International. There was also a bridge camera channel and GPS display channel. Every other channel was in either German or Dutch.
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