After tying other cruise lines, we happily choose Seabourn, with this being our third cruise with them in 2.5 years. The Encore is just a year old, but still looked new and stunning. It offered us beauty and comfortable elegance. Even on sea days, we rarely ran into other passengers, it was that spacious of a ship with one of the best space-to-passenger ratio in cruising that helped feel like it was our own ship.

Service remained the same outstanding Seabourn quality. Yes, we had some new crew members that weren’t perfect, but they wanted to please and do a great job. We loved our room stewardess, who was both housekeeping and butler. For us, we prefered to have one person rather than a separate butler. This way she understood who we were and what we needed, with our needs met before we even asked. The room service staff were fantastic and made sure that my evening caviar arrived automatically at 5:00. (BTW, Seabourn is the only cruise line that automatically offers unlimited free-of-change caviar.)

We thought our meals and snacks were fantastic. Yes, we had one meal the was just OK, but the majority of our food was great to fabulous. The chef even made us special sandwiches, for those day we wanted comfort food. Just for readers new to cruising, because of fire hazards, room service can’t use warming carts to keep food hot when delivering ... and that was not a problem for us. Both the ship-offered wines and the ones we bought were excellent. Also, the ship’s sommelier provided outstanding service and understood our wine needs. Read more