Perhaps my expectations were tainted by a cruise on the Eclipse back in May because I found the cabins and the wall veneer damaged alongside the beds (although you wouldn't have seen this if the beds hadn't of been brought together to form a double which also showed pieced in bits of veneer in a slightly different colour) and the bathroom mirrors missing their silver backing along the bottom and in the corners. The shower cubicle had traces of black mould and you couldn't adjust the shower rail to fix the shower heads position in place and had to rely on getting it to balance in just the right place to give you a continuous soaking. Unfortunately the cabin sprung a leak one morning after just getting up fortunately and deposited yellow water on the pillow end of the bed! This was sorted very quickly, however the bed side cabinet still showed signs of this when we left the ship with a caked in mess around the table lamp.

As for the cruise and the ports, these were great, although service levels on the ship, which was tired in many places were not the best I have experienced with other competing premium cruise lines providing better all round service or in fact when compared to the Eclipse, however the this ship probably had some of the best senior officers that we have sailed with and who seemed to look forward to mingling with passengers.

Food choice was what I would call adequate and edible in the main dining room, however, it very much depended on what you ordered as our table never had a bad rare or medium steak and the food was on many occasions just warm which possibly could be accounted for by the occasional slow table service. One thing that was great though, was the fact that Celebrity finally got the 144 hour transit free visa process in place for the Shanghai disembarkation. Chinese officials sailed and processed the passports on our only sea day from Sth Korea and we never had a problem getting off the ship. Read more