In my professional life, my wife and I assess services from a customer perspective, and have always tried to switch off when on vacation, cruising. However, having become fed up with the overly sugar coated reviews often found in cruise magazines and newspaper cruise reviews, and having just completed my fourteenth cruise, I thought it was about time I made my debut on Cruise Critic, which for me at least, seems to be the only place you can find a more balanced assessment of cruising. I assume that the magazine and newspaper reviews are frightened of losing advertising revenue, or dare I say, 'cruise freebies' if they are in the least bit critical.

It has been a very interesting experience cruising on two Celebrity ships, the Constellation and the Millennium, in the space of just over a month. Apparently they are sister ships, if this is the case the Millennium is in my opinion, certainly the ugly sister. We have a saying in England, 'all fur coat and no knickers' meaning while something may look good on the outside, more often than not it is lacking in substance. This, in my opinion, is certainly the case with the Millennium, where it seemed to me the passengers existed for the convenience of the staff rather than the other way around. Never in all my fourteen previous cruises, have I encountered so many unfriendly staff and managers, and it's an interesting concept, having a Guest Relations Manager, whose staff on the reception desk try their hardest to prevent access to. Their catering department also seem to have re-invented the concept of continental breakfast. I have stayed in hotels and cruised on ships all over the world, and toast and cereal have always been included in the aforementioned selection elsewhere, although not on this ship.

I have never understood why anyone working in the customer service industry who faced with two options of helping their customers or upsetting them, would want to choose the latter, which is what happened on more than one occasion on this Millennium cruise. The situation certainly wasn't improved by the fact that we were 'guinea pigs' on the ship's inaugural cruise for this particular Asia itinerary, something we were not told when we paid premium prices to book, but learnt very quickly when every time something went wrong the standard response from staff was 'well we haven't done this before'. Read more