Celebrity Equinox Review
Rating by category
Additional details
We did this Southern Caribbean cruise on the Equinox because our travel agent recommended it. We splurged and booked a Celebrity Suite. Almost everything about the ship was very good. It's clean, new looking, well maintained. I'll summarize our experiences by category. Note we were suite guests...
- Cabin and room butler - excellent
- Luminae dining room - friendly staff, excellent sommelier, but - the service was SLOW. I complained to the maitre-d about this early in the cruise and for a couple of days we got pretty quick service. But then it slowed down again. Sorry to say it but I have to conclude that they have a bad kitchen system in that dining room. Celebrity should give the best service in a dining room dedicated to suite guests, but it's probably the worst service on the ship.
Cabin Review
Celebrity Suite
The separate bedroom/bathroom was nice. The butler could leave my wife's room service breakfast in the main room and not disturb me still in bed.
Port Reviews
St. Croix
There were no ship's crew on the pier to give directions that day. We found our catamaran tour by asking local people on the pier. Once we got to the right place, the sailing and beach break were fun.
Antigua
Bus tour took us to some scenic overlooks from mountain tops. Catamaran tour had a buffet lunch, lots of food, OK but not great. Beach we stopped at was nice.
Barbados
We took the submarine/bus tour. The submarine tour was pretty impressive and that's why I rated this port a 4 stars. It was a no fooling submarine that held about 40 people and we dove to a depth of about 150 feet to see a sunken ship from the mid 1900's I guess, and then went over a lot of coral reefs. It lasted about an hour. It was a rainy day so underwater was not as bright as on a sunny day I guess, but we could see pretty well nonetheless. The second part, the bus tour, was a bust. It was rainy and the air conditioning on the bus was stuck on max cold. And there is just nothing very remarkable to see on Barbados. We were glad when that part of the tour was over.
St. Lucia
This day was another overcast wet day. We took a bus tour to the Pitons. They were in cloud cover from about halfway up. We stopped for lunch at a nice place on a mountainside. Lunch there was OK, not great.
Grenada
We did a bus tour that took us to a spice garden, that was pretty interesting. Then we went to a rum distillery where we got free samples and ended up buying a couple of bottles of various rums.
Dominica
We took the Whales and Dolphins Adventure here. It worked out really well. The boat we were on carried a hydrophone, that's how the captain knew how to find the whales. And the captain knew what he was doing. We spotted numerous sperm whales including some females with their calves. Most of them we got as close as probably 30 yards. And the captain knew what behaviors to watch for when the whales get ready to do their deep dives when their tails come out of the water for a couple of seconds. We saw about 4 whales doing their deep dives while we were out. I got a nice video of one of those events thanks to the captain's heads-up.
We did not see any of the island on land except for walking along the shore from the ship to the whale watching boat. The island did not allow the ship's passengers to go into local stores etc due to covid. Tour busses organized by the ship were allowed, but we only did the Whale Watching.
St. Kitts (Port Zante)
We did the Rail and Sail tour here. The rail part was a tourist train of about 7 2-decker cars and it went almost all the way around the island. It was pretty enjoyable. And we got onto a catamaran that sailed up the coast for about an hour and dropped us off close to the ship. St. Kitts looked cleaner and better maintained than the other islands.