I've always been restless on beach villa holidays and want to experience multiple locations, but don't like the stress of packing and unpacking lots of times; my wife also hates flying and so wanted a UK departure. I also wanted to see the Baltic, particularly St Petersburg but also Scandinavia. So when we were planning this year's summer holiday with our 13 year old son, this Baltic cruise caught my eye.

Never having been causing before, I had to overcome my initial prejudices and fear of being stuck on a long boat trip with thousands of others. And this cruise certainly dispelled those.

The booking and reservation process was pretty seamless. We went though a travel agent rather than spend days researching for ourselves online, and this saved a lot of time. My one criticism is that, once we'd booked and were choosing our excursions and checking in, the My Celebrity website is difficult and locks you out for 20 minutes if you open more than one window. Also on the IT front a functioning smartphone app would have been really handy to keep track of activities (like nearly every conference does). (It would need to be offline because few would want to pay the > $300 for on-board WiFi!) Read more