We've chosen Celebrity 3 times before and we thought we knew what to expect. Good food, good service, relaxation. In fact we'd been on the Equinox before just 2 years earlier.

This cruise was at best "poor". The excursions were mostly extortionate and most of the ports were completely uninteresting or inconvenient without paying for the excursions. But we don't particularly enjoy being with a bus load of cruise passengers all day so we prefer to normally do our own thing. This worked great in our Fjord cruise for instance. But on this cruise it was basically awful. Most of the ports are lined with taxi drivers badgering you to take their taxi or buy their tat. The surrounding areas were uninteresting and with the exception of Pisa, none of them had a worthwhile travel option with local transport. So welcome to a port and if you want to go anywhere then you need to walk. This was especially dodgy in Naples.

The food in the main dining hall was also noticeably poor. I wont bother with the details. We paid the extra for the alternative restaurants and these were more like we expected. The contrast with the bog standard in the main hall was quite obvious. Read more