Seabourn Spirit Review
Seabourn Spirit - Eastern Mediterranean
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Having traveled on Renaissance and Seven Seas cruises before, I was expecting our Seabourn trip to be in the same league. I was sadly disappointed. I sincerely hope that the problems we faced are not endemic to Seabourn overall. Perhaps we are setting very high expectations that our experience would be like our Renaissance and Seven Seas cruises, but those are the lines to which Seabourn is compared to in the literature. As my husband says, Its almost perfect but the almost is like a pebble in your shoe no matter how lovely the scenery, the pebble ruins everything.
Our experience was sufficiently bad that I spent $60 to write a three page letter to the Hotel Manager to let him know of our displeasure. I did get a meeting with him, but the only result of the meeting was that the $60 I had spent for the privilege of using Microsoft Office to write the complaint letter was refunded. I got the distinct impression that we were meeting solely so that he could say he had dealt with my complaints. He said that he had forwarded the complaint to the Seabourn offices, but after almost two weeks, we have heard nothing from the company via phone, email, or mail.
Service and Staff Tensions: While the service on board the boat was excellent, it often verged on being overbearing. Its one thing to bring drink refills promptly and without being asked, but some of our group (there were eleven of us traveling together) couldnt get the staff to stop opening our butter and jam containers. It was lovely having the staff know us by name, and we had many lively discussions with them. The staff eagerly joined in as our three twenty-somethings decided to make it a game to see if they could get from the buffet to the table without being helped. The sense of humor and playfulness of the waiters was a huge part of the enjoyment of the cruise. As we became more familiar with them, we found out that on a previous cruse, the service had not received a 10 which required all waiters to work an additional three hours per day until the rating improved.