We are 1st time cruisers, family of four, including two older teenage children. Everything went smoothly, journey and embarkation. Lovely welcome on board by staff. All staff were excellent their whole aim was to keep you happy and serve in any way possible. The ship was very comfortable, cleaning was continual, everywhere so nothing was ever dirty or untidy. Rooms were made up twice a day, always clean towels. Cabin Steward Joko was very friendly helpful and pleasant. Ours was an outside cabin on deck 2 with the girls next door. These were not huge but were perfectly comfortable and kept clean and tidy.

Food was fabulous we used a combination of the Lido and Meridian restaurants. Food was good in both but particularly in the Meridian Restaurant where we enjoyed excellent service from our waiter Alpin. We had a free upgrade at the point of booking to all inclusive, this was well worth it for a family party.

After our evening meal we enjoyed the nightly shows in the Broadway Show Lounge, entertainment was very good and was enjoyed by the whole family. we also enjoyed the other entertainers around the ship performing in different bars and decks at various points throughout the day and night. We enjoyed all our destinations and ports of call. Being an active family we were happy to walk into many of the destinations on our own and found most walk in ports were about 20 mins on foot to get to the main points of interest. We did take a couple of payable shuttle busses in Stockholm and Helsinki as these were a longer distance and also a shorter amount of time was allowed in these two places as it was an early leaving sail time. We found this the only disappointing thing, that that some shore days were not as long as we may have liked. Excellent full day trip in St Pertersburg which included a guide who spoke excellent English, and a very good Russian meal, which we all enjoyed. Read more