My husband and I are new to cruising – we’ve always preferred to base ourselves somewhere on land and spend time finding our way around ourselves. However, we decided to do this once-only voyage because we really wanted to see something of Alaska and this seemed to be the most efficient way of doing it. Our daughter and a friend of hers were travelling with us. After quite a bit of trawling through CruiseCritic for opinions, we settled on the Seven Seas Navigator (that plus the fact that its schedule fitted in with my husband’s), and I guess it all went pretty well because now we’re planning another cruise ...

Because it was only going to be a one-time thing, we splurged and went for a larger suite with a separate living room and a wrap-around deck, plus an inter-connecting cabin for our daughter and her friend; this added element of luxury may have influenced our overall impression – whatever, we thoroughly enjoyed the cruise and generally the RSS experience (a few caveats however, see later). Our suite was great, we really did enjoy the extra room, and the bed was supremely comfortable; our butler was good (well, we didn’t really ask that much of him but he was pleasant and obliging, although in retrospect he could have given us a little more information about some of the things we were entitled to); the cabin staff were excellent, always had a welcoming smile and addressed us by name; we thought the food in all the restaurants was excellent (I now need to go to boot camp!); our tours were mostly pretty good; in fact, the service almost everywhere was exemplary.

There are a couple of issues which I think are worth raising: Read more