This is our second trip on the Eclipse and third on Celebrity, we sailed on Reflection a few years ago. Embarkation was easy, although were told we couldn't board til 2.00pm we were onboard not long after 12 noon. We were pleased with our choice of stateroom, No. 7206. We had the 'slanted' balcony on what I call the 'sticky out' bit of the ship. It was a generous sized balcony. Our steward, Joseph was from Guyana and he did a great job. My husband is a cricket fan and Joseph is a big fan and a mine of information on the sport, my husband enjoyed his chats with him and even though England beat the West Indies, Joseph took it well!! We took the speciality restaurant package as it's now changed so that you can use a restaurant more than once, unlike last year. We ate in the Tuscan Grill and Murano, food was excellent in both. The Murano had the edge in service, but not by much, the staff in both were excellent. The entertainment was disappointing, mostly single performers, singers, pianist/singers. I can't speak for the comedians as I'm hearing impaired and don't go to shows where I have to listen too hard. The only shore excursion we booked was for Obidos from Lisbon as we had been to several of the other destinations before. Unfortunately our excursion was cancelled as only 5 other passengers booked it. We weren't offered any help or advice to arrange the trip ourselves and Guest Relations staff wouldn't tell us who the other disappointed passengers were. We would have been willing to pay a bit more if they had offered to arrange a small tour for the 6 of us but no help was forthcoming.

The Classic drinks package was included and the choice of wines suited us very well, we couldn't see the point of paying for the Premier package. On a personal note, as I've mentioned above I'm hearing impaired and can't watch films or any TV broadcast without captions. I had taken a portable DVD player so that I could have something to watch on sea days. I also forgot to take the lead to connect it to the TV set. The Hotel Director found a DVD player for me and had it set up. This was a godsend and it's the first time my disability has been catered for! They also offered a vibrating alarm if I needed it. Luckily my husband has normal hearing so he could tell me what the messages were, in case I needed to know! I'd just like to mention here that when we were on the Emerald Princess last year, they were showing several captioned films (and all free to view), so I hope this is something Celebrity will look at. Judging by the number of hearing aid wearers on board it will probably be welcome. I couldn't even understand the inhouse films about destinations, etc. Maybe these could be captioned? Talks were also inaccessible to me but I guess having a 'speech to text' transcriber on board would be too much to hope for!!!!

We will travel with Celebrity again in the future and look forward to doing so.