We have just returned from our first cruise with Ambassador Cruise Line and as is the way of things on this website there will now follow the usual post-cruise “brief” summary review, getting some thoughts down while the trip is all fresh in our minds. And as is also the way of things on this website the daily cruise and port travelogues will follow in due course, where “in due course” means sometime between now and the heat death of the universe. You only have to look at the most recent articles on this site to realise we’re about eighteen months behind in detailed write-ups so that will give you some idea when to expect those.
Now, I’m well aware that some people who might stumble on this post while looking for details or reviews about Ambassador Ambience will take one look at the length of this “brief” post and cry, and while I’m not averse to making visitors to this site cry I am feeling generous right now and will tell you all you need to know in one sentence so you can close the browser tab early: if you are exactly the same sort of people as us then you will love your Ambassador Ambience cruise and won’t hesitate to book another one.
I’ll start with a little review of an Ambassador cruise in general and Ambassador Ambience specifically, particularly with how it all compares to other companies we’ve cruised with. After that it will be a brief look at our itinerary and highlights of it. Sorry, “brief.”
Ambassador Cruise Line At Tilbury, London
Getting to Tilbury was nice and easy from the M25, and with it being a far quieter port than, for example, Southampton, there was no problem with traffic. We didn’t want to risk driving up on the day because we’d be chancing our luck with delays at Dartford and we’ve been stung by that before. What we actually did was drive up the night before and head the (not that much) longer route clockwise around the M25 from the A3 in order to stay at a Premier Inn near Waltham Abbey. Cheap, close to a couple of pubs, midday check-out, and only 45 minutes from Tilbury the following day while avoiding Dartford which was perfect for our 13:00 boarding time.
Embarkation
The process if you’ve got car parking at Tilbury is that you drive in, wait in a small queue behind other cars, then take your cases out of your car to hand to porters, drive to where you’re directed to park, get out, walk the short distance to the terminal, queue to pass through security, wait to be directed to the check-in desk, do that, have your photos taken, walk around to pick up your boarding cards, and proceed to the ship. From parking to boarding the ship for us took about ten minutes. Excellent. The bit at the start in the queue behind other people unloading their bags… about another ten minutes. And there were only three cars. It took us under forty seconds to step out, open the boot, take the cases out, close the boot, drive off. How it takes people upwards of four minutes to do this is beyond me. Anyway…
The terminal building is really nice and we actually would have liked to look at more of it but the check-in and boarding process was so fast we never got a chance. I will have to look into its history when I get around to the full write-up.
Disembarkation
There’s a very important thing to know about disembarkation at Tilbury if you’re cruising with Ambassador and we were so happy to see people try to ignore the guidance about this because they’re super-special and the rules don’t apply to them, and get completely caught out as a result.
You’ll get an estimated departure time and a lounge in which you can wait for someone to come in and tell you when you can disembark. The announcement is not made over the speakers and the reason for that is to make sure that each group waits in the lounge and doesn’t head off to do their own thing elsewhere and cause congestion. The departure times are organised by decks and locations fore or aft, so for us, for example, on Deck 10 Forward (Yay! Star Trek!) we were to wait in the Observatory and could expect to get off at 09:20. It was a little later than that, but not by much. The reason that they do this, though, is that the luggage hall at Tilbury is small so they can only offload a small number of cases at a time and they do this in the sequence of being called. So if, like a lot of people, you think “Eh, I’ll get off early! Screw the system!” then instead of sitting in a lounge on the ship you get to sit on a plastic chair (if you’re lucky) in a concrete building on stone floor with shutters open to the elements because your cases won’t be there yet. We laughed to see so many who’d done just this.
Ambassador Ambience Cruise Ship
Ambassador Ambience is a one-of-a-kind cruise ship. There is (now) no other ship of the same design in the world, and much of that design comes about because of the history of the ship’s construction and the use of renowned architect, Renzo Piano (The Shard in London, the Pompidou Centre in Paris, and many others). She has a dolphin-like look to her front and on the ship itself the lounges are tall, giving them a sense of height and grandeur that you just don’t get on modern ships.
We’ve talked to people who were worried about the colour scheme that Ambassador Cruise Line uses: the purple and green. While they are complementary colours I can definitely see that the colours aren’t for everyone but that’s irrelevant because you don’t see them used together on the ship at all.
A quick explanation of the main public areas.
Raffles Bar is Art Deco, blacks and silvers, and utterly gorgeous. It’s a piano bar that would be absolutely perfect if you could transplant the Crooners drinks menu from Princess into it.
The Botanical Lounge is like a classic English orangery, reminiscent of an immense greenhouse with potted ferns and exotic plant species from around the world. Colours here are pale beige, cream, and green. Relaxing, bright, used for piano and violin performances (from two entertainingly grumpy performers) on our cruise.
The Purple Turtle Pub doesn’t look like a pub, nor is it particularly purple, and not once did we see a turtle in it. A recessed pit area with seats is surrounded on two sides by more seating and has a small performance area at one end for the resident band or host of quizzes or game shows, and a small bar at the other.
Centre Court is where you first board the ship. It’s an oval space over three decks with seating, a bar, a café, the shops, reception, and the small casino off it. Light green colouring to match with the tennis theme chosen here, it’s similar to an atrium on other ships but without being that noisy central part that you have to go through to get to other places. In fact, we hardly visited this area at all because it was arguably too quiet for us.
The Observatory is the nightclub. It’s in that bulbous dolphin head at the front, similar to a Crows Nest on a P&O ship but just staggeringly beautiful at night. Here there are purples and blacks and a design that puts you in mind of a spaceship.
Ambassador have done an incredible job with the interior designs on Ambience but there is an important thing to remember: she is an old ship, and old ships have issues.
Now, if you’re the sort of person, like us, who is also old and has issues then it’s very easy to overlook some of the problems we encountered on Ambience. In fact, I’d say it makes her even more loveable as a cruise ship. It means Ambience has personality. She has a feel to her. She’s not the latest mega-ship clone with all the latest equipment and all the best facilities. Quite frankly, if you were to cruise on her and expect as much then you have more serious issues than Ambience.
This is a review (a “brief” one, if you remember) and not a sales pitch or attempt to curry favour with cruise lines, and perhaps for some people a helpful guide as to what you might expect should you choose to cruise on Ambience too (with the understanding that every cruise, every cabin, every expectation, every experience is subject to random chance) so let’s not hide the problems away and pretend everything was fantastic.
Issues Aboard Ambassador Ambience
It was incredibly warm at times on Ambience. The air conditioning on the ship appeared to be geared towards the expectation that because we were heading into the Arctic Circle it made sense to turn the heating up ahead of time. That would’ve been tolerable if we could have escaped to our cabin and cooled down in there but if the dial on the wall had any impact on the base temperature then we never worked out what it was. Our cabin, in fact, was on occasion the hottest place making sleeping particularly challenging for us until we realised – and here’s where booking a balcony cabin helped – that we could wedge the balcony door open with a chair at night. We slept with our balcony open every night north of the Arctic Circle in March. That tells you how warm it was. I’m pretty sure we weren’t the only people doing this given the whistling noises from the doors to cabins along our deck.
Showers on cruise ships have sometimes been subject to fluctuating temperatures in the past for us but not to the extent we had in our cabin. It ended up turning into a form of roulette. With no change to the setting on the shower what exciting skin-boiling or body-freezing temperature could we expect? And for how long?
Announcements into the room drove us mad. Like all cruises we’ve been on, announcements can be sent to public areas or they can be sent everywhere, including the cabins. Telling us a port is cancelled or that the all aboard time has to be moved forward because of the weather are great examples of when announcements should be sent to the cabins too because that’s a change to expectations as printed in the daily programme of events. Telling us that we’ve arrived in a port at the scheduled time and that the gangway is where it’s expected to be and that the shuttle buses are running as explained and that literally nothing is different from what everyone was anticipating both prior to the cruise and based on the night before’s information delivered to the cabins simply has no place being broadcast into the rooms of people at 08:00 who were still in the nightclub at 03:00.
The lifts were very temperamental. They would sometimes declare the weight had been exceeded with only a few people in it. Some people told us one lift kept stopping a few floors below where they wanted to go then headed back down. One lift worked on day one then never again. We had the fun experience of having to press the alarm button to get out on one occasion because the doors wouldn’t open and the lift wouldn’t move. Each lift is entertainingly decorated in its own way so, for the record, it was the woodland lift, and every time we got in it after that event we did so with mild fear.
Ambassador’s Approach To Cruising
Those were the issues we encountered enough to notice them, and none of them were the sorts of things you’d complain about because they were more than offset by all the good things aboard Ambience.
Ambassador Ambience is a small ship, relatively-speaking, and the cruise line does some things in a more traditional manner than you might be used to if you’ve been cruising on larger, more modern ships, so here are some of the things to be aware of if you’re thinking of cruising with Ambassador for the first time.
The buffet area is a decent size and the quality of food was perfectly fine for breakfast but the variety of items was small and unchanging. That’s understandable given the fairly low number of passengers. Just note that whatever range of food you see on day one will be the same for the remainder of the cruise. We can’t say much about lunch or dinner as we only had a quick meal of random things there on one day when we were heading out for a trip in the evening, and we tried the afternoon tea on a couple of days and that was basic but fine enough. Worth noting is that everything is served by staff and you don’t help yourself, and that there is no formal queue system so plan your approach to stations accordingly to avoid hot food going cold while you wait for someone to complete their order for toast so you can get some bread rolls.
Dinner in the main dining room is at fixed times on tables ranging for four to maybe eight or more that you can request ahead of time but which you can always change aboard. There were some 2-seaters but we found that our table for four (second sitting, so that’s 20:15) worked well enough to ensure we weren’t there ages. We never had problems with missing game shows or performances because the times worked fine. Four courses is the norm with an appetiser then soup or salad then main then dessert, and like the buffet the quality was perfectly fine even if the types of food didn’t vary wildly. None of the meals really matched the quality we’ve had on lines like Princess, and it would’ve been nice to see some more contrast in some of the meal designs. Many of the main courses I chose were fish, potatoes, and vegetables, with the fish and style of potatoes changing every day but not enough; the fish was always fresh and well-cooked, falling apart under the fork, but the potatoes also tended to be mashed or crushed (that’s lumpy mash to you) and so it didn’t offer a good textural contrast. Great if you’ve got dodgy dentures, though, I imagine.
There is no late-night buffet on Ambassador ships so if you’re one of those people who absolutely must have something to eat after dinner then go see a doctor and get yourself tested. Weirdo. What Ambassador do, though, is bring around trays of nibbles between 23:00 and 23:30 to the public lounges. Think hors d’oeuvres and samosas, that sort of thing. The first time you see them you’ll think it’s a bit odd but by day three you’re keenly awaiting them to turn up and halfway through the cruise there will be a Pavlovian response to the trays’ arrivals. We loved the trays.
We tried speciality dining on Ambience on two nights.
Sea & Grass is a mostly set menu. There were some nice courses, but some were just about okay. We thought the overall experience was comparable to our Marella speciality dining from years before in that it was a step up from the main dining room, but maybe not a huge step. Our big problem was that it amounted to a one-and-done experience because nothing was quite good enough to come back for.
Saffron is the Asian restaurant on Ambience. Any regular readers – humour me – will know that we aren’t fans of Indian food so the only times we order food of this style is on cruise ships “just to see” and our experience to date hasn’t been brilliant. Service in Saffron was actually quite awful with us sitting for forty minutes with a glass of water and a glass of wine before anyone took our order, and that was due to officers being present who were getting all the attention from the waiting staff. Special, we didn’t feel. The food then came fairly fast, one course after another – not ideal – but, fair play, we both thought it was the best food of that style that we’ve had on any cruise.
We’ve moaned about the state of prizes on Princess ships in the trivia over the years but Ambassador went one better (or worse) by offering only one prize per team. This didn’t make it easy to join other people for the quiz because you’d need to work out who would keep the prize should you win, but whether you’d want to is another matter entirely. The low quality prizes were a running joke between the entertainments staff and passengers, though, and we’re very glad of our Ambassador-branded luggage tag, flimsy fridge magnet, and stress ball that we managed to acquire. The variety of quizzes was good with a traditional general knowledge one in the morning, a video-clip-based one in the afternoon, and a mixed general knowledge and themed quiz in the evening. We liked the additional mystery voice quiz they ran throughout the day too.
Would We Cruise On Ambassador Ambience Again?
Yes. The right itinerary, given the great value pricing that Ambassador offers makes this an easy one to say yes to anyway, but it’s mostly because of that hard-to-describe feeling we got after being aboard Ambience for just a little while, and I’ve mentioned it already. Ambience just feels right. She’s the right size. She’s got the right set of quirks of character that endear her to you. She’s designed for passengers, not for cramming passengers in. She’s so stylish. By day two we were simply happy being on Ambience despite any issues. In a lot of ways we thought she was similar to P&O’s Aurora or Princess’s Island Princess. Older, sure. Smaller. More spacious. But Ambience has the best looks of the three and she’s the one we’d pick first to cruise on again.
Northern Lights Cruise Itinerary And Experiences
Our cruise on Ambassador Ambience was a 17-day trip, making it equal to the longest total trip we’ve done to date and the longest one entirely on a cruise ship. We didn’t want to try a short cruise as our first with Ambassador because taster cruises sometimes skew things by appealing more to a younger demographic and not reflecting fully a typical cruise, and we’re sure that’s part of the reason why our experiences with both Celebrity and MSC haven’t lived up to expectations so far.
Hardangerfjord
This was not planned. This was not a cruise that really should have featured fjords very much, instead hugging the Norwegian coast up to the very top, but the very first port of call, Haugesund, was cancelled early in the morning of our arrival there due to the wind conditions and safety. We’ve been to Haugesund before and had a nice enough time but it’s not the prettiest of places and there wasn’t anything we’d planned to do anyway so the scenic cruising along a fjord we’d not heard of instead and which I don’t think we’ve ever seen on a cruise itinerary before suited us fine. And it was beautiful.
We cruised up as far as Furebergsfossen waterfall, did a few turns, then headed back out. Having a balcony cabin was perfect for this as we could duck back inside from the chill blowing in off the distant glaciers and mountain peaks but just a few metres down the corridor from us on deck 10 there was also a forward viewing area below the bridge and nightclub that’s open during the day so we and many other people frequently popped out there just to get a wider view of what’s ahead. Before it got too cold and we had to scarper inside again.
Bergen
On our second cruise ever, and our first to Norway, the first port of call had been Bergen and we were looking forward to seeing it with more seasoned cruising eyes. We had plans but we also had one of us – me, for a change – who’d injured himself just prior to this cruise, tearing a calf muscle. That hadn’t fully healed and we’d only just stepped ashore when I felt it tweak again. Many of our plans were discarded and we ended up walking around very slowly with plenty of stops to rest. Ambience’s captain had announced that instead of departing Bergen at 18:00 as planned we’d be staying overnight but most things were shutting by early evening anyway and we were in no state for finding a club or pub in the dark. However, we did get around to the aquarium and we did check out a craft ale bar for a few drinks that also sold loads of vinyl. We’d have stayed longer in that bar if it hadn’t been so cold inside.
Ålesund
The last of the Norwegian ports we’d visited before was Ålesund and we pushed my injury to its limits with more walking than we should have, this time heading up to a viewing point on the west side of the city – not the main one everyone else goes to, but we do like to be different – before heading down for a great visit to the museum set in the former pharmacy. A bit more exploring to the east to eat up time – another place we wanted to look at ended up being closed – before the brewery right next to where Ambience was docked opened, and that’s where we sat for a couple of hours. The pattern of exploring then drinking will repeat itself a bit here.
Trondheim
Trondheim is pretty flat and very walkable but we still took advantage of the shuttle bus – they were all free for us in every port on this Ambassador Ambience cruise – to eliminate some of that walking to start our day here. We visited the art museum, the cathedral, the regalia museum, and the museum of archaeology (the last three of those on a combined ticket), and enjoyed them all. The cathedral was particularly nice. There are many more things we’d like to see on a return trip to Trondheim. We finished with a walk back to the ship via a craft ale bar (surprise!) which had lovely beer but not the best service in the world.
Tromsø
Our first encounter with snow on this cruise took place at Tromsø. Opposite where the ship docked was a botanical garden that had been a thought about exploring before we’d arrived, but that was all under a dozen or more centimetres of snow. Walking on the compacted snow and icy patches was obviously a concern for Mr Dodgy Leg here too. The free shuttle bus was used again and we visited another aquarium – we like them – then went hunting for some art sculptures along the shoreline. We cancelled our plan to cross the bridge and head to the cathedral over the water and opted instead for a few hours in the northernmost brewery in the world, and that was a very popular, absolutely wonderful place to enjoy craft beers.
Alta
This was as far north as we’d get on this cruise and we had 36 hours here. On the first day we had overcast, snowy conditions. An afternoon excursion took us to the Sorrisniva ice and igloo hotel. We’d wanted to visit a proper ice hotel – not one of those bars in a freezer you see in cities – and this really did not disappoint at all. The construction was great, the ice carvings in the walls were lovely, the suites with their colourful themed decorations in the snow and ice were superb. Not only that, but outside, trudging through calf-deep snow in snowy conditions around the back of the hotel we found some reindeer. A great trip and not something we’d seen other people do with most people we know seemingly absolutely determined to all do the husky ride.
After the ice hotel we were dropped off in Alta but there’s not a lot there. We did visit the church for its architecture but that was about the limit of interest. At night we headed out for four hours of aurora-hunting, making our way to the edge of a fjord and sitting out on furs in deep snow hoping to catch something in the gaps in the cloud cover. We never did, but it was still a fun and interesting thing to do. The following morning we departed Alta and passed P&O’s Aurora coming in to take our place.
Lofoten
Our only tender port was at Lofoten and we’d decided that we’d probably head in for some scenic walking rather than anything arranged because there didn’t look to be a lot to do otherwise. As it was this plan was adjusted because our stop was shortened for weather. Strong winds were due and a few hours ashore were all we could do so we took the free bus from the port into Leknes and decided to walk back to the port by a prettier route. And it would have been if we’d been able to see much of it under the rain and low cloud. We still enjoyed getting soaked and would loved to have seen more of Lofoten. Leknes itself, though, looked pretty devoid of any interest to us.
You can see what the weather was like as we leaving Lofoten in the picture below, and that weather is why our final Norwegian port call at Bodø the following day was also cancelled in order to give Ambience a chance to get ahead of the wind and waves and not risk a fast and rocky crossing afterwards to the last port.
Aberdeen
After two days at sea, one rocky, one calm as you like, we arrived at the final port on this Ambience cruise, Aberdeen. We had an excursion here to Crathes Castle and Gardens which turned out to be eventful as we got stuck on a road thanks to an accident ahead – a truck on its side, just off the road, spilling fuel, that required the road to close – but with no way for our bus or some other trucks to turn around. The police eventually let us through much to our panicking guide’s relief as nobody was answering the tour emergency numbers she was calling. The castle was lovely, as were the gardens – always nice to visit something a little different – and the gardens probably look even more spectacular in summer when everything’s blooming. We’d intended to walk around Aberdeen (as it looked very interesting) and visit a bar (surprise!) after the trip but that was when we thought we’d be docked in the north docks, and that wasn’t the case. Given my leg and the need for a shuttle bus and the fact we’d been up until three in the morning chatting in the nightclub, we made our way aboard Ambience for the final time.
Northern Lights Cruise Review
The big question is, of course, did we see the Northern Lights? Yes, we did, on a few nights, and some of it had colour visible to the naked eye. That only happened while on the ship, though, and not on the land tour where we’d hoped to see it and where we had all the equipment set up for long exposures on tripods, so all the shots were handheld and on the phone and subject to ship movement.
Not ideal, but it wasn’t the main purpose for going on this cruise for us.
This cruise on Ambassador Ambience was to see what Ambassador Cruise Line were like as a company, to see what we thought of the old lady of the sea, Ambience, and to visit a host of new ports for us and to properly cross over into the Arctic Circle for the first time. In all those areas this cruise exceeded our expectations. Not only that, but we also saw orca for the first time, with one surfacing right in front of us from our balcony, maybe under fifty metres away. I’ve wanted to see orca for years and while I know it wasn’t arranged by Ambassador I’d still like to thank them for being around when it happened.
Ambience is not without a few issues but they’re the sorts of things that make her stand out. Ambience is beautiful. The crew were great. We met so many good people aboard and it’s worth mentioning here as well that one family who were travelling from Belgium had their dad with them on dialysis; they’d looked around for cruises to do this as it was something he wanted to do but only a few lines offer the service, with Ambassador being one.
And a final but important thing to point out is that we’ve never been on a cleaner ship. Hand gel dispensers never ran out, the paper in the waste bins was never overflowing, the public spaces were spotless, empty glasses were rarely left on tables for very long, banisters were constantly being washed down.
Ambassador is a cruise line we will definitely be cruising with again at some point.