We have about 10 cruises under our belt with Princess, Crystal and RCI. The main reason we choose this one was that there was a direct flight chartered by Celebrity from Hamilton airport (15 minutes from our home). It included an all inclusive drinks package and prepaid gratuities. This also avoided us having to go to Toronto airport (at least an hour away) which is always a miserable put through. Similar charters from Ottawa, Quebec and Halifax put well over 500 Canadians on our cruise not counting those who made their own way. It is a clever marketing strategy by Celebrity for its Caribbean cruises (both Eastern and Western Caribbean) from February through April that certainly seems to be drawing lots of customers. For this reason a lot in this review will try to be helpful for the thousands of Canadians who will have the Celebrity charter experience over the next few months.

We were on the first Celebrity charter this year from Hamilton (cake was served in the departure longue to mark the occasion) but it seems that all the kinks hadn’t been worked out. The aircraft 737 was operated by Canadian North and the (contracted) ground staff didn’t seem to have it together. We had boarding by sequence number which worked by them giving you a number when you arrived at the desk to check your bags; we were #111 and #112. They first invited all those with numbers 1 to 30 to board and look for seats and then they went through the other numbers in groups that way. So there was no pre-seat selection. Boarding involved walking across the very cold tarmac to the ramp to board the plane because there are no jet bridges at Hamilton airport.

On board the service was good and adequate meals were served both ways. The movie system on the plane going down wasn’t working and coming back only one toilet was working. Operating so far from their home base must make small repairs difficult. The worse problems were at Miami airport because of the very long walks and lineups involved. We had to show our identity documents at least four times with lineups to print out entry tickets and so forth. The walk from Concourse F where we landed to baggage claim was very long but some shuttles passed by you could use if you were spry enough to hop up on them. From the time we landed to leaving the airport on the bus to the ship was a two and a half hour ordeal. Read more