We are many time Silversea cruisers. This is the largest ship we have sailed with. It is not as intimate as the smaller vessels in the fleet. The staff was very nice, but on the smaller ships, they know your name and you cannot get out of a buffet without someone offering to carry your plate to the table. It is hard I expect to keep up with 600 passengers vs. 350. Food for the most part was excellent and our cabin butler and maid were excellent. The downside of this cruise was primarily new, small city ports for the liner and they had not much to offer. Because they are not regular cruise stops, they don't have professional guides. We had 2 nice excursions and one amateurish one. Don't want to pay $129 per person to be bored. My siblings had even worse experiences than we did with several bad excusions. SS needs to send an advance team to new locations to really vet the places.

Very good sushi for lunch in the Japanese restaurant. We ate at both paid evening venues, La Dame and Senshi (sp?), and would skip those in the future. La Terraza and the Alantide are fine. Indochine I liked but my wife was not impressed. The Grill is very good.

One nice thing about the larger ship... you barely feel the waves. Very smooth. The one thing that was missing was a self serve coffee / cappuccino bar for early risers. They had that on the small ships observation deck. Not on this one. Either get room service or wait till 6.30 to get coffee in the Arts Café. Read more