Upon boarding the ship, my husband and I were in high spirits. We are microbrew fanatics and had cancelled an identical itinerary departing out of SF on another line in order to experience the Beer Festival At Sea that Celebrity was offering (our first Celebrity cruise). Even though we are from Northern CA, we felt the drive down to LA was worth the experience we were going to have with Celebrity.

First, our luggage was lost. OK, no biggie. Then, when we entered our cabin, there was a very loud scraping noise in the room. It sounded like a desperate raccoon was trying to escape from the (metal) ceiling. We asked a Guest Relations (GR) rep to come check it out. He said it was normal air conditioning noise. Ummmm .... no. We knew this was bonkers, so we walked down to the GR desk to discuss with them, and lo and behold there was our luggage, dented and broken. We didn't complain. Raccoon ran away later that day. No one ever told us what the noise was.

Stayed out until 2am the first night and at 6am we were woken up by the captain's announcement regarding the tender process. (It was later discovered that the intercom in our cabin was on, and the announcements were piping directly into our room as if it were an emergency announcement). We were told - every 30 minutes in English, then Spanish - that we needed to get a tender pass from Deck 7(?) before heading down to the boat. When my husband went to get a pass, he was told there was no wait, so we could proceed directly to the tender boats. We went to our cabin for my purse and jacket and 5 minutes later, at the tender boat, were told that we needed a pass. We were then assigned to boat 11. The tender boats were taking approximately 20 minutes round trip, meaning we would be waiting for at least 1.5 hours. Apparently they had an "unexpected rush" of passengers, according to the 12-year old crew member handing out the passes. Read more