Celebrity Silhouette: Disappointments And Redemption

I thought I’d have a stab at putting down some quick thoughts (well, quick for me) about our most recent cruise, that being a 3-nighter taster cruise aboard the Celebrity Cruises ship Celebrity Silhouette. As with all of our travelling experiences there will be in-depth details and plenty of photos to accompany the full write-ups of this short break when I get around to it but I thought I’d throw together a blog post now covering what we liked and what we didn’t like about our first cruise with Celebrity while it’s all still fresh in the memory.

We’d never cruised with Celebrity Cruises before so this 3-nighter round-trip from Southampton with an overnight in Amsterdam that was offered at a good price and that wouldn’t use up any of our annual holiday allowance seemed ideal. On top of that we’d heard good things about Celebrity. Things like “They’re a bit like Princess” or “Beautiful ships, great food.” And, finally, my wife’s cousin swears by them as the cruise line to go with. Expectations were high.

Things We Liked About Celebrity Silhouette

There’s no denying Celebrity Silhouette is a good-looking ship. Plenty of artwork – some conventional, some more modern and quirky – dotted around the vessel; the ship-high central atrium with glass elevators off it and a tree growing in the middle was spectacularly attractive; everything was very clean.

The variety of drinks venues was good… in principle (more on that later). We liked the dark, intimate Ensemble Lounge. We liked the contrast between that and the harsh, modern World Class Bar. We liked the look and feel of the wine cellar. We liked the contrast again with the cold Martini bar. The range of alcohol was also excellent but only once you worked out what that range was. Again, more on that later.

Bathrooms and public toilets were fabulous. Clean, bright, spacious, well laid-out. We loved the subtle downlighting in our cabin’s bathroom which meant we didn’t have to switch the light on if using it at night. We loved the flannels for drying hands in the public toilets aboard.

The buffet area, Oceanview Café, was really nicely arranged and with a very large variety of food on offer. My wife was stupidly pleased at being able to get hash browns every morning for breakfast. Even better – and not something we’ve ever really been bothered about on other ships – was having proper plates and glasses. Quite amazing what a difference that made, how much more upmarket it felt. Certainly something Princess should look into.

The coffee machines in the buffet area and elsewhere around Celebrity Silhouette were excellent. Good quality coffee, convenient, surprisingly usefully-placed. We really liked having actual cream for the coffee too.

Being able to order room service on the TV for free (although we didn’t) looked great.

Things We Didn’t Like About Celebrity Silhouette

The embarkation process was painless. Getting into our room was a pain. We’d initially thought that starting embarkation at 10:30 (when we’re used to early afternoon on Princess) would be awesome, especially with us being Concierge Class and having priority embarkation anyway. The reality was discovering we had to trundle our carry-on cases with us everywhere until all the rooms were ready and passengers were allowed to get to them. That was over two hours after we boarded. Why weren’t the decks open as each one was complete rather than waiting for all of them to be done? Why wasn’t there priority preparation on the Concierge and Aqua Class decks? There’s nothing relaxing about having to look after two small cases in more compact conditions than usual (because everyone was in the same boat luggage-wise and all the room corridors were closed off).

With the exception of the Martini bar and wine cellar, the menus in the drinks venues were poor with both a microscopic selection of speciality drinks and nothing at all about everything else on offer. Take the Ensemble Lounge, for instance: four cocktails listed with the rest of the pages being wine or beers. As it turned out there was a dazzling array of drinks available there and you could easily order off-menu but you needed to know this (we didn’t until the last night) and look for yourself to see what they had then hazard a guess as to what price you might be paying.

Drinks were very expensive. We didn’t get a drinks package (despite the half dozen attempts to get us to do so in the first two hours aboard) because we know they’re almost never worth it despite the amount we drink (and we’d be spending most of the day in Amsterdam off the ship). From talking to other people we realised that an awful lot of drinks seemed to be priced just above the threshold for the packages too so that an additional charge often had to be made. There were grumblings on the ship about this.

There wasn’t enough seating near the Martini Bar. It was the most popular bar by far and it had large areas of space around it that really could have benefitted from some standing tables with stools, for instance. Because of this lack of seating a lot of people were hanging around the bar itself making it near impossible to get served (more on that in a moment).

The On-Demand TV service on Celebrity Silhouette wasn’t particularly good. The number of movies was quite small and the ones you had to pay for, in many cases, were movies we’d seen for free on Princess ships or on flights in the last six months. It’s not a major thing, especially on a small cruise like this was, but on longer duration trips it’s sometimes nice to have a cabin day.

Food quality was average at best. We’d heard good things about the food on Celebrity ships but our experience on this taster cruise didn’t match the expectation. We had the wrong food delivered once (that’s the waiter’s fault) but the food in the main dining room both for our “Exclusive Concierge Class Lunch” and the first evening (the only time we dined there) was okay taste-wise but definitely on the colder side of tepid and that had to be a general dining layout/management issue. The other people we were dining with said the same thing. While we liked the variety of food available in the buffet we certainly avoided a lot of it as it didn’t look particularly appetising (fried eggs, for instance, looked grim). We had speciality dining in the Murano restaurant on the last night which was far tastier, served by friendly staff, and the sort of thing we’d generally been expecting but even there the meat we’d ordered was more well-done than we’d requested.

We like to identify where the smokers go so we can avoid it. On Celebrity Silhouette we couldn’t work that out. As far as we could tell everywhere on the top deck seemed to be fair game for the smokers, of which there were loads, which made being outside somewhat unpleasant.

The One Thing We Hated About Celebrity Silhouette

The service was utterly abysmal aboard this ship. We are used to finding a bar or lounge, grabbing a seat, then waiting for one of the staff to come to us and take our order. I know that some people like to sit at the bar and order there but we’re not those people. What we very quickly discovered was that there were so few staff actually taking table orders in the various venues around the ship that going to the bar was the only option if you didn’t want to expire through dehydration. And at the bars, of course, it was rammed because everyone wanted a drink and nobody wanted to move away when they got one because there was nowhere to sit. With places like the Passport and Martini bars having central bar areas open on all sides there was also nothing even resembling a queue to order drinks or make it easy for the staff to spot who had been waiting ages while the pushy and/or beautiful people had somehow managed to be served twice. On three occasions we had to leave the bar we’d wanted to drink in because we simply couldn’t get served.

It wasn’t just us feeling this way.

The attitude of the staff in the bars was equally bad. Perfunctory order-taking, drinks-making, bill-producing was the standard for most of the cruise. I have nothing but admiration for the quality of drinks produced and our drinks orders were right every time but there were no smiles, no banter, quite often not a single word at all. We know why, of course. Because they never seemed to get a break. There was nothing but constant drinks-making because they had no service staff working the tables. It almost never felt welcoming.

Would We Choose To Cruise With Celebrity Again?

This was a 3-nighter taster cruise. We had made allowances for the passengers cruising with us; we knew they’d be more boisterous, more Brit-heavy than on a conventional cruise. Other than breathing in smoke too many times from some of the filthier animals on board we had no problems with our fellow cruisers. But we couldn’t overlook the issues we were seeing. Of the things we liked on Silhouette there was nothing there that factors in to us choosing a cruise line and ship. The important things for us are destination, price, food and drink, and service, and on those last points Celebrity Cruises were a huge disappointment and we’d already decided before we’d left Amsterdam that it was probably the worst cruise we’d been on and it would have to take something really special for us to consider cruising with them again…

… and then a miracle occurred.

On our final day as we cruised for home we’d spent some time wandering around, taking photos, enjoying going through the locks at IJmuiden, generally relaxing. We’d tried without much success to get a drink or two but places that said they were open weren’t and places that were open were painful. All the usual stuff. And then the clock got to around six in the evening. We had a booking at the Murano restaurant so we went to get a pre-dinner drink at the Ensemble Lounge and just went straight to the bar because we figured there’d be no point grabbing a seat. And the barman smiled as we decided to go for a bourbon each. And he poured the single measures. And then he free-poured some more. “Nobody saw,” he said. Now this was more like it.

After our enjoyable and mostly good dinner we returned to the lounge, sat down, and a steward appeared who we’d not seen before and took our order. And did it again. And again. And again. We were suddenly getting friendly, prompt service. We were often getting measures far larger than we’d been asking or paying for. This was great. We listened to the jazz duo for their entire set and they came across to talk afterwards. Wonderful. I mean, it’s the sort of thing we’d hoped and expected would be the norm from the start based on our experiences aboard other cruise ships but it was wonderful compared to the previous few days aboard this one.

So giddy with joy and alcohol by this experience were we that we ventured up to the Sky lounge where we’d previously had to abort any attempt to get a drink, only to find it both filled with happy, dancing people but also still suddenly possible to get served. We drank more, we danced (which typically follows the drinking more), we got talking to a Brazilian couple celebrating their wedding anniversary. We have no recollection how we got back to our room or where that huge bruise on my leg came from.

Those last six or seven hours on Celebrity Silhouette went a long, long way to redeeming it in our eyes. The consistency is a concern (I’d love to know exactly why it was so Jekyll and Hyde) but if that last part of the taster cruise is more in keeping with how a Celebrity cruise really is then they’re certainly back in the running for picking cruises in the future.