Booked this cruise with our travel agent on its inaugural Barcelona to Venice Regent 25th anniversary cruise in April, as we both had birthdays that month. The ship was great, our room was great, the staff was great except for restaurant management. My travel companion is gluten intolerant which was noted when we booked but through the lack of knowledge and incompetence of restaurant management, she ate something that was not gluten free which resulting in her having to spend two days of this expensive cruise sick in bed. Even after this incident and after meeting with management, they basically could not agree on what was available for someone with gluten intolerance. We would be told that a gluten free option was available at breakfast, but when it was asked for, restaurant staff said it was not and this how the whole ten days went and even worse, many promises made by management went unfulfilled. When we went to dinner at their upgraded Pacific Rim restaurant after my companion recovered, we were told by management that the head chef would meet us at our table to prepare a special gluten free meal for her, but when we got there, we got a menu with ball point pen checks next what she could have. So much for meeting the chef, but that is how the whole cruise went.

To make matter worse, we paid extra for an ungraded 10 hour tour of Rome with a guide that dumped us at Trevi Fountain with map with circles around historic place in the area and told that we were on our own, a drive by a block away from the coliseum without even a photo opportunity and on two different occasions our guide lost people which resulted in 30 to 40 minute delays as went out to search. The guide was totally incompetent and the tour was not worth a dime of our money.

It seems that when things start to go wrong, everything goes wrong. We were locked out of our suite twice when the electronic lock failed and at the end of the cruise Regent management managed to lose our luggage for 20 minutes between the bus and the air port terminal, but those are just the highlights of this expensive disappointing cruise and at that point all we wanted to do was go home. Read more