My wife and I are in our late 50s and this was our first cruise because my wife was not really interested in cruising. However, we were celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary and this cruise allowed us to visit places we had never been before. We picked the cruise largely for the itinerary and the reputation of Celebrity based on reviews here and comments from people we know who had cruised with them before. In the month before our cruise there were a number of very negative reviews of Celebrity and this ship, in particular. We began to worry that we may have made a poor choice.

We were in a Skysuite at the very aft of the 12th deck. Accordingly, we ate most of our meals in Luminae where the choices were somewhat limited (but you could also choose from the Silhouette memu which we did a couple of times) but the food was, in my opinion, very good to excellent. The service in Luminae was also very good and, frankly, was a cut above what I am used to in some high end restaurants in Toronto. The staff was very accommodating, gave us very good advice regarding which dishes would likely be the best and the sommelier did a great job of pairing wines with our meals. We ate at the Tuscan Grill once and at Murano once. The meal, service and ambience at Murano were sublime. The meal at the Tuscan Grill was excellent but our waiter messed up a couple of aspects of our order. He was very friendly and attentive but just messed up. Never experienced that problem in any other venue. We ate at Silhouette on one of the Chic nights and the meal was very good and the service was as well. Overheard a couple of passengers who complained of very poor meals one night at Silhouette but others said the food was fine.

There were complaints in earlier reviews about poor service at the bar and by servers around the pool. We ran into no such difficulties. Found the service from everyone to be good to excellent. There were also complaints about constant upselling by staff. We did not have a drink package. We were asked if we wanted to purchase one when we got on the ship and when we declined the matter was not pushed. We were asked very politely the same thing by bar staff a couple of times over the first couple of days but again when we declined there was no further attempt to upsell us. The sommelier in Luminae explained the wine packages to us and we did buy a 3 bottle wine package. We tend to drink a 1/2 bottle of wine with dinner and the 3 drink package provided u with very good wines for 5 dinners. Read more