Veteran Cruisers under whelmed by first time on Celebrity

[avid]

My wife and I are veteran cruisers (with over 16 cruises in the past 15 years on RCCL, Carnival, Norwegian, Disney, etc) and after long looking forward to the Celebrity experience, we were disappointingly under whelmed by our first time on a Celebrity ship-July 25, 2008 Seattle to Alaska cruise. The Infinity is certainly showing her age and that’s ok.. but fungus and other "gung" in the shower, non working stateroom lighting and television among other things is certainly inexcusable on any cruise, I would think especially so especially in “Concierge Class”.

Although service on board was adequate (but certainly not remarkable) I would assume that these problems are largely due to inadequate management, which is surprising on a cruise line that positions itself as a cut above the others. We found the food, entertainment and activities offered to be the standard fare and certainly enjoyed better on both RCCL and Carnival. But having purchased pre-cruise wine and specialty dining packages, we were surprised and disappointed at the way those pricy purchases were handled once on board (8 bottles of wine were delivered to our cabin rather than placed in the dining room as originally requested and our pre-paid dining experienced for SIX in the SS United States specialty dining room required so much paperwork, to balance the billing accounts, at the dinner’s conclusion as to overshadow whatever could have been an otherwise memorable experience and celebration). As mentioned previously, several complaints about non-operational stateroom lighting resulted in as many prompt attempts to repair with no final resolution until the final (very late) night of the cruise where repair work in the bathroom took nearly an hour and left us with a filthy mess of work remnants as to make our final use of the bathroom in our stateroom a disgusting experience.

Finally a word about the stateroom’s TV. Although we certainly do not cruise to watch TV, it is regrettably so integrated into the cruise experience these days by way of public announcements, room service ordering, excursion ordering, billing account mgt etc, its use is unavoidable. Our TV had a HOLE where the power on/off button should have been and using the dilapidated remote control (which was incidentally held together with scotch tape). More shocking however was our unwitting ability to view other passenger billing accounts as well as their room service orders, pay per view movies (porno included) all unsolicited and unavoidably available to us by merely turning the TV on via the broken remote. Amazing lapse in ship management to say the least.

Given this experience, I doubt that another Celebrity cruise is in our future.

[micmacmissy]

Sorry you didn't enjoy Celebrity.

 

Agree with you that the TVs onboard are old, at best. Did you call to request a tv repair? Did you let them know you were able to view other cabins information?

 

Usually they are great about responding to concerns about the room...did you bring the shower to the attention of your room steward?

 

Wondering what paperwork was required at the end of your specialty meal? That certainly didn't happen with us.

 

How was Alaska? The shore excursions? What did you think of the spa?

 

Would love to hear more info about the cruise!

Thanks-

[happy cruzer]

Thank you for sharing. I agree that Celebrity sets your expectations pretty high so it is easy to be disappointed. Your repair issues sound like a nightmare. We are veteran cruisers too. Long ago we realized if we ever need to call Customer Services that we were in trouble. I try to avoid it at all costs, trying to get something fixed is just not what we want to do on vacation. We now cruise in an inside cabin at a low fare and let go of all the maintaince issues (short of a broken toilet or shower). I don't think any line handles "Customer Service" well.

 

Hope you were still able to enjoy the other parts of your cruise.

[bbro]

I agree, the Tv's are horrible. We also had a hole where the power button used to be and the remote worked about 50% of the time. We're also used to being able to view our digital pics each night, but the tv was so old we couldn't connect our cables to it. We couldn't see anyone elses information though. Makes me glad that we never ordered any porn though ;)

 

The Spa started off rocky. We buy a pass to the Persian Garden as soon as we get on board we love it so much. But this time out of the 3 specialty sauna's the Sahara didn't work. They also lost almost all of the womens locker keys. I had to give my clothes to either my husband to put in his locker or bring it up front to the desk if I didn't want to leave it unlocked. We complained about the Sahara to the Spa Manager Erica (along with 3 other couples) and were told "It's a dry sauna". Only after we insisted they come with us and check did they admit it's not supposed to be stone cold. It was fixed by day 2 (broke again day 3 but worked again by day 4) but they never managed to get any locker keys. We also complained that they insisted on leaving the door to the Persian Gardens open, so you could hear everyone talking outside in the spa lobby area, not very relaxing. By leaving the door open it also covered up the sign that said "You need to check in at the Spa before entering the Persian Gardens". SO many people didn't realize you had to pay to enter it. For the first 2 days we'd go in and it would be so crowded. When I asked people if they paid for the week or just got a day pass (I pretended I was trying to see how much a day pass costed) some would say "I haven't paid for this, I thought it was free". Erica was so apologetic about everything and she really did her best to get everything right again. And the locker key thing didn't bother me anymore and I didn't wear things like my ugg boots or a nice sweatshirt up to the spa anymore. They also started to keep the door closed and immediately the crowd was down by at least 1/2. So in the end we were very happy with the Spa (Try the couples Razu treatment!!) and our old Persian Gardens was back!

 

We still loved Alaska and enjoyed our aft cabin to it's fullest!! :D

[Lois R]

Hi, sorry you didn't enjoy your cruise and that Guest Relations

didn't come through for you.

Looks like this is one of the cruises where quite a few CC member were

on board....2 people, same cruise, totally different experiences.....

seems to happen on every sailing.

[Ma Bell]

Sorry to hear of your problems. We had 28 people on Infinity in June with no problems. They do need some new TVs, but ours worked well.