Celebrity Reflection Review
First transatlantic cruise -- won't be our last!
Rating by category
Additional details
After cruising on Oceania and Seabourn, we did a 7-day Alaska cruise on the Celebrity Millennium in 2016, and were very impressed with the ship, crew, and food onboard. So we decided to try a transatlantic trip in 2017; we selected the October 20 departure from Civitavecchia to Ft. Lauderdale.
The cruise capped off an 8-week trip; the first 6 weeks were on land in Europe, visiting multiple countries. Thus, by embarkation day we were ready for nothing but relaxation, and that is largely what we got. We arrived by plane from Sardinia the day before embarkation and spent the night at the Hilton at the Rome airport; we booked our own transfer to Civitavecchia for 11:00 the following morning, which got us to the ship in plenty of time.
We had booked Aqua Class on this trip (up from Concierge on the Alaska cruise), and I'd say Aqua is going to be our choice from now on.
Cabin Review
AquaClass 1
Cabin Review
We had cabin 1553 (deck 11 midship, port side) -- close enough to the forward elevator bank to be convenient, but far enough from the elevators to be shielded from noise. The cabin itself was not quite as large or luxurious as the one we had on Seabourn -- but the cost of this 14-day cruise was about half that of a 7-day cruise on Seabourn.
The bed was very comfortable, and we both slept well after getting used to the motion of the ship. We heard little if any noise from neighboring cabins or the hallway.
There are two small problems we noticed in the cabin: 1) there aren't enough hooks to hang things up (we solved that by buying magnetic hooks that attach to most cabin walls); 2) there are no power outlets convenient to the bed (this was an issue because my wife needed to plug in a CPAP machine at night). But our cabin attendant, Genevil, took care of that by taping the extension cord onto the floor, so no one would trip on it.
Other than that, the cabin was fine -- and the daily afternoon delivery of a plate of little amuse-bouche was a nice touch.
Depending on the ship's orientation relative to the incident swells, there was a fair amount of pitch and/or roll. Roll was detectable even without a view to the outside, but the only way I could tell the ship was pitching was to be on deck and watch the motion of the rail against the horizon. The most roll was on the sea days between Civitavecchia and Barcelona and between Málaga and Santa Cruz de Tenerife. The midship location of our cabin mitigated the effect of pitch, but it made no difference in terms of roll. Neither of us suffered from motion sickness, but the rolling motion woke us up repeatedly because we felt like we were going to fall out of bed. However, we got used to it pretty quickly.