Our cruise, started August 11, 2017, featuring the Military Tattoo excursion in Edinburgh, Scotland. The show was great... second to none! Celebrity's inability to handle the tender service for 1,300 passengers returning from the event at ~11 PM was a complete DISASTER!

It rained heavily that evening. Notwithstanding the rain, there still would have been a serious problem getting the passengers back to the ship; read on.

Celebrity only had 6 tenders to handle 1,300+ passengers all returning from 11 pm to 11:30 pm. Each tender can only handle ~100 passengers per trip. It was a cold rainy night. Passengers had to wait in the rain for periods of 2.5 to 4 hours to get on the tender back to the ship. This was related purely to the insufficient number of tender vessels provided by Celebrity. No arrangement was made in advance for commercial tenders to handle this high capacity of returning passengers. The Captain advised that the full cycle time to get to and from the ship was 75 minutes. Just do the math, and one can determine that this was a plan destined to fail whether it rained or not. Certainly the ship's senior leadership could have determined this as they possessed all of the relevant facts. Read more