Celebrity Reflection Review
Unexpected wonderfulness in the little details, odd misses
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I've been on more than 10 cruises, but didn't bother to count back when I started cruising 20 years ago. In that 2 decades, I've grown out of the party-party-party mood of the Carnival line, and enjoy the little things much more fully.
The spa experience is amazing. Aqua class gives the cruisers access to a special dining room where the cuisine is so good, I can't figure out why anyone would bother to pay to go to the other specialty restaurants. Of course, it LOOKS cool to go to Qsine and get some molecular gastronomic delights, but not on a day when they're serving carpaccio in Blu... or lamb... or steak... or... well, just about anything. I'd not miss the Blu experience!
We also took advantage of the 1-2-3 Go offer to have a drink package and upgraded to premium, which means we could drink nearly anything we wanted, including specialty coffees, fresh squeezed juice, bottled water, and premium cocktails cooked up by the experimental bartenders or martini bartenders... we had the good wine with dinner, and the sommallier remembered our favorites, which feels amazingly luxurious... no thinking twice about ordering a drink, no fussing about the fact that this coffee was not what I had hoped for or that glass of wine was under-poured. No worrying about calculating the tip or collecting receipts and adding them all up on the last night when they give your final bill to you... Even if we did not drink enough to justify the price of the package, the peace of mind involved in not having to even think about it, was worth it.
Cabin Review
Aqua suite: Don't expect to be right next to the spa. We were near the rear of the ship and the spa is at the front. We were also a flight down from the spa. To get there, we had to walk the entire length of the ship and up a flight of stairs (or take an elevator one flight). Usually, especially if you're just going to use the Persian Room, you're going to be in a bathing suit, robe & slippers... and it feels odd because that's not the generally accepted dress for the rest of the ship (who are taking the elevators up & down).
The good thing about being so far to the rear of the ship is that it's also away from the elevators and there is not a lot of noise... no passers-by... the only people who would ever go past your room are the few whose cabins are further aft... or people who are lost. There are no elevators aft of this room, and no public rooms.
This cabin is small, like most shipboard cabins I've been in, with no wasted space. There is very limited hanging space for hanging clothing, and not much in the way of drawer space. However, there is a large cabinet over the head of the bed. You've got to be pretty tall to reach it (we're tall and it was a stretch for us to get things from the center of this cabinet), or else I suppose you're going to have to hop up & stand on the bed to reach it. The bathroom has plenty of drawers & cubbyholes to hold all toiletries, and the special shower head tower is nice.
The balcony on this room is between two support beams that cut across the wall between it and the adjacent rooms on either side, but these did not obstruct the view in any noticeable way. We did not have any problem with cigarette smoke smells. I had read reviews where some balconies might have a problem because some occupants think that's a great place to sneak a smoke, but either the spa-loving aqua class occupants don't have this issue as much, or the room staff stay on top of the issue... whichever it is, we did not have a problem with this at all.