Silver Shadow Review
If this is 5-star luxury I am living in a dream - or in a nightmare
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Additional details
We wanted to go between Singapore and Hong Kong on the southern route, having 'done' the northern on other lines. We were only interested in a true luxury cruise and while we read Silversea's blurb on "ultra luxury" we thought that perhaps half was true and the other half publicity hype, but it would be better than average. Wrong!!! It was 3/4 hype and 1/4 reality, so of the three lines on the route, this was the poorest - and the most expensive.. First the good bits. ALL the restaurant and housekeeping staff - with one minor exception, a sour-faced girl behind the food counter in the Terrace, - were great and as Silversea have a wonderful no tipping policy, they are not doing it for immediate reward. The food was edible but a bit boring, but edible is a plus. The so-called 'La Dame' restaurant, (with a $60 entry fee) was ok, but FAR from Haute Cuisine. The other issue with La Dame was that they had changed the name of the restaurant and failed to change the signs. Silversea boast of their tie to Relais et Chateaux, but why? R et C are just a glorified hotel booking agency, they own no hotels, no restaurants and while a great booking system are nothing to do with "good food". The restaurants in the R et C guide have all paid to be in there and as such R & C cannot be impartial. The main restaurant is in the bowels of the earth on deck 4 and we only visited it once when we were invited to a staff table. The food in the terrace on deck 7 was fair but very boring. They had a different "fish of the day", but as they cooked every fish the same way, it was hard to identify them. Room service was fine, but did not live up to the hype with all courses brought together as most lines do, so all except the first course was cold and any ice cream melted. The wine list was good and very drinkable wine was included at every meal, except breakfast of course; this was very definite plus!.
The Captain was not a native English speaker and coupled with a dreadful sound system, his broadcasts were mainly unintelligible. Even worse was the Australian tour person who described each coming port. It soon became a competition to see how many times she described each place using the exact same words and the exact same flat tone. We were promised "Opera" selections as entertainment by the singers. They started off well with La Traviata and Don Giovanni but soon went back into pop type music, but at least it was Italian pop. Knowing the issue of poor shows, we take a selection of opera and ballet DVD's, but the TV sound was so bad that even this was not an easy escape for us..
We had two lecturers aboard, one was wonderful being an ex-BBC newsreader, but the other while being a clear expert had poor presentational skills, but there were so few 'talks' that even a poorly presented one was better than nothing.
Cabin Review
Grand Suite 2
We had suite 802, a Grand Suite facing forward just under the bridge. To put in mildly -It was tired! It was designed well before the days of 'electronic everything', so the paucity of power sockets was a dratted nuisance. The layout was from another age! Conceptually it was spacious, just poorly designed; the space being eaten up by Silversea trying to cram in as much junk as they could. Do we need FOUR, yes FOUR hand basins? It had a bidet, wonderful, but it was in such a tight space that it was hard to use. Do we need two huge Victorian armchairs that are too heavy to move and banged into your legs every time you tried to walk by them? There was decent table and four dining chairs, but then a very large coffee table to match the two huge armchairs. Of course there was also a big old fashioned sofa. It reminded me of a touring caravan design, rather than an "ultra luxury" suite. The bed was also very poor, having soft edges. Why is this bad? My wife sat on the edge of the bed and promptly slipped of onto the floor.
While we were in one of the most expensive suites, it was not a good choice as being right at the front, any poor seas were magnified in pitch by the length of the boat turning about its centre of mass - a silver suite in the mid ship section would have been more comfortable - and a lot cheaper.