Azamara Quest Review
Rating by category
Additional details
I am not sure if the Cruise Critic gods will allow this but they have my permission to remove it before they post this but...you can see pictures and video from this trip at www.jkbellomo.com. (It is our non-commercial travel site).
Some background on us and our cruising style. For those of you who don't know us, we are a mid-fifties couple who love to travel. We have done land vacations and cruises and we have found that we love cruising more. If you don't cruise let me tell you the biggest reason why. You only unpack once. That's it. You get to your hotel and you unpack for two weeks and every night (or on this cruise every other night) your hotel moves to a new location. In the case of this cruise that location was usually in the heart of a city that was incredible and someplace we never thought we would go. 10 of our 13 previous cruises have been on Celebrity Cruise Lines. We hold what they call Elite status in Celebrity's Captain's Club (like a frequent flyer club) which gets us some nice perks. We have been big fans of Celebrity since we first sailed her in 2004. But our last major trip had been a cruise on Celebrity's new Solstice class ship and we found her too big for our tastes. A beautiful ship, just too big for us. Besides we were ready for something new but we didn't want to stray too far. About three years ago, Celebrity (which is a subsidiary of Royal Caribbean) spun off their own subsidiary, Azamara. We decided to give them a try. The biggest differences between Celebrity (X) and Azamara were size (only two ships and both carry less than 700 passengers) and style. Celebrity is a more traditional cruise line with assigned seating times and tables at dinners and formal nights as well as nine ships (the smallest carrying 1750 passengers). With Celebrity (and its parent company RCL) it is becoming more of a situation where the ship is the destination. This isn't the case with Azamara. And that's what we were looking for.
Azamara's small ships enable it to sail into ports that larger ships can't. Azamara doesn't have formal nights, assigned dinner seating and assigned dinner times. Suffice it to say, it's a more relaxed cruise line where the destinations are the ports. That sounded perfect for us. So when Celebrity cancelled a cruise we had booked to Australia and New Zealand that would have sailed at the same time as this Asian cruise on Azamara we decided to switch. And we are glad we did.
Cabin Review
We had cabin 7074 on the port side of the ship. If I had to do it again, I would book the same cabin but on the opposite side of the ship. Two reasons; first, we were just about directly opposite the laundry room which Kathleen said she didn't mind so much but I thought it was a bit too crowded outside our door on many occasions. The second reason is that I would want to be on the starboard side in Hong Kong so you wake up looking at the city and not at the pier. Other than that, it was a 1A cabin, the same size as the Celebrity C class ships. The bathroom was small but that's what you get on a ship. Especially a ship this size. You can't take a shower without having the shower curtain glued to your backside. The cabin die great for us. We were pleased and would have no problem booking the same class again.