cruiseteachers

We are Sondra & Tom who are very experienced Senior cruisers booked on the September 6, 2021 12 night Monumental Egypt & Israel cruise.  This is our first cruise with Atlas Ocean Voyages, but we have had more than a hundred cruises over the past twenty-five years, most of them when Sondra was a Guest Lecturer for Oceania, Regent, Celebrity and other cruise lines.  We are looking forward to being passengers on this cruise.  We have both just had our first vaccination for Covid and we are scheduled for the second dose in about three or four weeks, so we hope that we will be well protected from the virus by the time we travel.  

Videos from May 3, 2017:

Viking River Cruise in France, May 2017

This is the first in a series of presentations I am creating from images my husband and I collected on a Celebrity Infinity Cruise Valparaiso to Buenos Aires on January 17, 2016.

Can't find the YouTube icon to embed the link so I will put the entire link here and hopefully clicking on it will take you to the site.

If anyone can give me a screen shot of where to look for this icon, I will embed in the future.

Sondra S. Ettlinger

cruiseteachers at gmail dot com

We were on that sailing and were not impressed with all the Private Function signs for the Celebrity marketing group. Sometimes it was just a small group, but they closed down the whole Reflections lounge for them. At sail-aways and sunset, except for Day 1, it was closed. They also met at the Martini Bar (at scheduled times) and overran that--people could not get drinks.

 

You would think that group would be more considerate of the passengers. I did make comments about that on the questionnaire.

 

We did smell "sewer" smells while walking through the halls on deck eight a few times.

 

Overall, we had an enjoyable cruise.

Over a year ago, we began planning a family reunion and chose to have it on December 9th aboard Celebrity Constellation because I have traveled Celebrity for fourteen years and always found their customer service to be excellent. We were a small group of 22 passengers. Before boarding, we were sent a list of our group reservations for the Beta and Gamma conference rooms. However, upon boarding, we were informed that none of the conference rooms were available for us. Instead, they had reserved Michael's Club for us for 1 hour most days, and a few times for an hour and a half. The bar was still open, and passengers wandered in for drinks, so we had no private time for our group. The room was too dark for the video sessions we had planned and the noise from the bar invaded the voice over on the videos making them nearly unusable. With no outside lighting and the dark room, our family photos are mostly noisy, pixilated, and odd colors. On the next to the last day of the cruise, we found out that our promised space had been filled with the CEO and a corporate group. We were never informed, and we did not get to experience the best that I know Celebrity can deliver. To those passengers who were inconvenienced by our short times in Michael's Club, I offer my apologies for something that was beyond our control. I have written a letter to Michael Bailey CEO/President to outline our experience, and my TA is filing a report as well. My main issue is that if anyone on the staff had been up front with us about the lack of space for my group, we would have planned differently. Instead, our expectations were not met.