Scenic Spirit Review

It's luxurious, with Egyptian cotton sheets, L'Occitane toiletries, gourmet dining, all-inclusive beverages, a pool and spa. It's comfortable, with minimalist designs in neutral colors that are never jarring or pretentious, and a bed you sink into at the end of the day for a great night's sleep. It's friendly, with a mostly Cambodian crew that strive to know your name on day one, smile whenever they see you and jest with you at dinner. It's sociable with cruisers interested in mingling and getting to know each other. And it's caring, with crew and fellow cruisers truly concerned about your welfare. Feeling under the weather or overwhelmed by your excursion to the Killing Fields? You're as likely to be offered medicine or a comforting hand from your fellow passengers as you are from the crew.

Built in Vietnam specifically for Mekong River cruising, Scenic Spirit is everything you'd like a river ship to be, especially when you're exploring developing destinations where travel can be challenging. It's got spacious, larger-than-average cabins you're thrilled to come back to after a hot, dusty morning visiting a Cambodian village. It has a pool (and not just a plunge pool at that!) for cooling off in the hot afternoons and a spa with unbelievably affordable massages for working out the kinks after a rickshaw or ox cart ride.

Even with all that said, highlights have to be the dining and the destination-immersive activities including the shore excursions and onboard enrichment.

Meals, including the buffet lunches, were always excellent. The chef uses as much fresh ingredients as he safely can, with fruit and vegetables sourced at local markets a couple of times a sailing. (Meats have to be imported as sanitation standards in Vietnam and Cambodia are not safe for Western travelers.) Wine is free flowing and while we did hear some veteran Scenic cruisers comment about there being less choice than on the European cruises, no one actually complained about the wine being served.

The destination side of Scenic Spirit's offerings was also top-notch. We were particularly impressed with the breadth of excursions available. Out of the six full days on the ship, four had excursions in both the morning and afternoon. Four days also offered free choice excursions, giving cruisers plenty of opportunities to choose their own experience. The destination immersion didn't stop when they ship was sailing either. For those interested, you could learn more about Cambodia history, take an Asian cooking class or discover just a few of the supposedly 101 ways to use the traditional Cambodian krama scarf.

A word about service on Scenic Spirit. It's nearly perfect, but not quite there yet, particularly with the line's much-touted butlers. As an all-suite ship, all passengers have access to a butler on a sliding scale of services. But we found the line wasn't proactive about letting us know what we were entitled to receive, nor did our butler go out of his way to tell us. For instance, our big, heavy suitcase was placed in our closet and not on the bed, leaving us to lug it from the closet across the room to the bed. And our walking shoes, which were coated in dust after being out in small villages, were simply moved to a corner of the closet each evening but never wiped down (We did eventually request that our butler clean the shoes for us, but only after consulting with other passengers as to whether that was something we could ask for.)