Check-in was very smooth and we where onboard within an hour. Saphire is a lovely ship and we managed to find out way around most of the time. We had lunch in the Horizon every day including the first day. The food plentiful and I was able to find foods that suited my special dietary requirements. We did traditional dining and found the others at our table just lovely. We had two ladies from California, a couple from Mexico who only dined with us on the first night and a couple from England we are from Perth Australia. So it was a very cosmopolitan table.

The only problem we found was with the availability of staff around the pool area at certain times. There seemed to be a scarcity of bar staff at times and the bar was extremely busy with guests trying to get drinks as there was no one to serve them. There was also only one bar person on. Think they need to do something about their rostering. We found all the staff to be just lovely.

A photo package was available on our cruise which was apparently a trail. We took advantage of said package and got some really lovely proffessional portraits done. The package was for all the photo's of you during the entire cruise which included 2 formal nights and 2 casual nights when portraits where available plus photos at each port. At $199US is was good value if you want photo's. We where celebrating our 42nd anniversary and took advantage of as many of these as we could. You could have portraits taken in as many of the spots as you wanted and they would all be included in the one price. I found the portraits to be of good quality and the photographers where good at their job except for one. We only went to him once and his rudeness led to a complaint being made. We had several different photographers over the time and all of them took lovely photos except the rude, arrogant one who apparently upset several people on that particular night. Not too worry plenty of other staff available who where just lovely dealing with so many passengers all wanting lovely photo's. Read more