We travelled on the 14 day cruise to "Falklands, Elephant Island, Antarctica, Cape Horn, Ushuaia, Puerto Madryn, Montevideo and Buenos Aires departing BA on 31 Jan 2010. In the end bad weathe ruled out Falklands, Elephant Island, and 4 crossings of the Drake Passage yielded 6 hours in Antarctica.

An interesting cruise, which was not, as others have said, your "typical" cruise. For a start it was only 30% US citizens, the balance of 70% of passengers being strong contingents of Germans, Spanish speakers, and Europeans from a myriad of countries. And the majority were there to do what the cruise appeared to promise, that is to "see Antarctica". In other words the "normal" cruise delights of shopping, bingo, one arm bandits in the casino, and so on, were not what they were looking for. They wanted the destinations, the Falklands. Elephant Island and Antarctica.

This was the rub, Celebrity were completely unable to deal with the split between the aspirations of the US passengers (I use the term in its generality), by and large happy with cruising and the majority of other nations who had booked to see the destinations and the cruising was by the by. The upshot was we missed reaching the Falklands because of the weather - it was not just another port of call for the Argentinians wanting to visit the war graves of the family, and not having any other way of getting there. And we faced missing or at best having 6 hours in Antarctica. The communications of the facts surrounding the cancellation and/or amendments to our itinerary were not made by the Captain, but by the Entertainments Manager (we were later told that the Captain's English was not good enough for him to have made the announcements). Further we later learned that the Captain had virtually no power to make any decisions himself over course changes, and that Miami had to make the calls. The problem was that, whilst I would agree that changes have to be made for weather, the way in which the passengers were told, overlooked that the majority of passengers were there to see Antarctica and the Falklands, and had there been reasonable doubt about the ship getting into those two places when we booked, then we would not have booked. The Falklands and Antarctica were not any two ports, they were the reason for booking. In short communication with passengers was appalling. They actually went further and deliberately (I learnt later from the hotel director) removed the TV GPS chart to disguise the fact that the ship had changed course hours before passengers were told what was happening. The Entertainment Manager blithely telling us in his best bingo voice that it was for our own good, and with no back up of charts, really was not the way to tell the ship's passengers. Read more