We have cruised many times on Celebrity and chose this itinerary because it had a combination of ports that we wanted to see again, ports in the Black Sea that were totally new to us, and because the cruise sailed round trip from Istanbul, which we had always wanted to visit. We were joined by 3 couples we met cruising the Adriatic last year. I call it a cruise of two halves because the first few days can only be described as perfect, perfect weather, perfect ports, perfect excursions, and the second half of the cruise was, well, less than perfect with unexpectedly unseasonably cold weather, rough sailing conditions, a change in the order of ports, a missed port and a spot of norovirus thrown in for good measure. To quote Dickens, "It was the best of times. It was the worst of times...”
Pre-cruise
We flew out to Istanbul via Munich on United a few days before our trip. We had paid to upgrade to Economy Plus when we first booked our flights and had seats in row 17, but when I came to check in 24 hours ahead we were for some reason in middle seats in row 39, aka Economy Minus. It took a while to get that sorted, and while we didn’t get our original seats back, we did at least get seats in Economy Plus. A word of advice if you have a booking with United, check regularly that your seat assignment hasn’t changed, as our seats disappeared on the way back too. We had a tight connection in Munich, but our flight arrived 30 minutes early so we had no problems making our onward flight to Istanbul. Arrival in Istanbul was relatively painless. We had purchased the Turkey visa online and the immigration officer just gave it a cursory glance. For those who didn’t buy the visa ahead of time, the line at the airport was short and the visa looked a lot nicer than my printed out barcode!
This cabin is under the entrance to the buffet, but is between two of the overhangs, so has a normal sized balcony ceiling. Cabin was well located and quiet.