We took advantage of Celebrity's 3 night sailing from Sydney to take younger relatives on their first cruise. While the three children aged 7, 9 and 10 had a great time, the same could not be said for the adults. This was our fourth Celebrity cruise, having previously sailed on Solstice, Equinox and Century and we found that much to our dismay this cruise did not live up to our previous positive experiences.

Solstice is still a beautiful ship and oce again we found her to be immaculately clean. Our interactions with crew members was mixed, from exceptionally good (Linda, the maître d in the main dining room) to slapdash (some attendants in the buffet) to harassed and harried (room attendants).

We had booked interconnecting balcony staterooms however when we boarded the ship we found they weren't connected. We joined the long line at Guest Relations with three children in tow only to be told the rooms could not be connected. We showed our documentation which clearly stated interconnecting rooms and drew their attention to the deck plan which indicated our cabins to be connected to no avail. It took some persistence and a call to our travel agent before staff eventually decided the staterooms could in fact be connected. We returned to our rooms and in less than 2 minutes a staff member had connected them. It was not the start we envisaged, and frankly Celebrity's customer service was lacking. Read more